English Linguistics
Welcome to English Linguistics!
For us, linguistics is one of the most fascinating fields of research. As a linguist you investigate the extraordinary human ability to communicate effortlessly using language. As an English department, we are particularly interested in the English Language and how it works. However, in linguistics there are many fascinating questions to be asked and answered:
- How and why did language develop in the first place?
- How and why is language constantly changing?
- How is language acquired by children?
- How is language learned as a second or foreign language?
- How and where is language stored in the brain and how is it processed?
- How does language interact with cognition?
- How is language used in and shaped by society/social behavior/different societies/different groups of society?
- How does Artificial Intelligence create and learn about language?
- How do the languages of the world differ from each other?
- How can/should a (foreign) language be taught best?
- How can the coding system of a language be described best?
- How does language interact with other communicative phenomena such as co-speech gesture?
If you want to be a linguist today, you are not only dealing with the analysis of language as such, but you should also know about empirical (statistical) methods and computational technology and be open to insights from disciplines such as sociology, psychology or neuroscience.
OUR TEACHING
In our BA courses we attempt to give undergraduates a thorough overview of the whole field. Among many other things, you will learn about:
- Phonetics: the study of speech sounds
- Phonology: the study of sound systems of individual languages
- Morphology: the study of the creation and structure of words
- Syntax: the study of structural units larger than words (e.g. phrases, clauses, sentences)
- Semantics: the study of word and sentence meaning
- Pragmatics: the study of meaning in context, study of discourse
On top of that, we offer courses on a wide range of more advanced topics. We are very keen to cover aspects of linguistics that are relevant to foreign language teaching in many seminars every term, especially (but not exclusively) for students who want to become teachers of English. Other seminars regularly offered are concerned with issues of linguistic theory, language acquisition, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics and language change and variation.
At the level of MA-courses, we contribute to three different Master Courses:
(1) English Studies (Linguistics & Applied Linguistics)
(2) Linguistik
(3) the European Erasmus-Mundus Master Course on Lexicography.
OUR RESEARCH
With respect to research, there is a focus on the description and theoretical modelling of various aspects of language employing different methodologies: We are particularly interested in:
- Cognitive Linguistics
- Computational Linguistics
- Corpus Linguistics
- Individual Differences in linguistic knowledge
- Language Aquisition
- Language Change
- Lexicography
- Models of Syntax
- Multimodal Communication
- Phraseology
- Psycholinguistics
- Usage-based Cognitive Construction Grammar
Our research is strongly linked to the Research Training Group “Dimensions of Constructional Space” (Graduiertenkolleg 2839 funded by the DFG) and the FAU Interdisciplinary Centre for Research on Lexicography, Collocation and Valency, to which we contribute.