Introduction à la linguistique / An Introduction to Linguistics

In this course, students will discover the various domains of the language sciences and contemporary approaches to linguistics. We will focus particularly on the properties of language as a specifically human activity with two concrete manifestations: the textual and the oral, as idiolects, sociolects, and dialects. In this perspective, we will examine the following dichotomies: langue / parole, competence / performance, synchrony / diachrony, as well as the main characteristics of the linguistic sign and language systems. These notions will be expanded upon in an initiation to fundamental concepts of the language sciences, taking into account objectives, problems, and the theoretical and methodological issues that each of them involves. Exercises in distributional analysis and formal manipulation will help students become familiar with the tools necessary to understand both aspects of language: form (phonetics, phonology, syntax, and morphology) and meaning (structural semantics and pragmatics).