This module expands on concepts introduced during ET118: Linguistics: Understanding Language in order to provide core knowledge and skills for students in phonetics and phonology as essential fields of language study. It aims to:
- Familiarise students with the phonetic and phonological systems of the world’s languages.
- Introduce methodologies from a range of linguistic disciplines to document, study, and analyse language data.
- Engage students in linguistic analysis within a language and cross-linguistically, both synchronically and diachronically.
- Introduce research about and approaches to subfields of linguistics.
Do you have a topic or question about Language, Culture and Communication or English Language and Linguistics that you would like to explore in depth? By the time you get to the third year you are likely to have a lot of potential areas of interest. For the dissertation module you get the opportunity to develop a project around one of these interests and, with the support of a supervisor, conduct research and write it up! As well as developing content knowledge in an area of interest to you, the dissertation will help you enhance your research, critical and creative thinking, time management and academic writing skills. The dissertation module also provides excellent training if you are interested in undertaking postgraduate study beyond the BA.
This module engages you in empirical studies of real-world speech communities. You will describe regional and social dialects of English, with a particular focus on Coventry and the West Midlands. You will gather language data through a variety of methodologies, including collecting written surveys, conducting face-to-face interviews, and data-mining social media. You will deepen your knowledge about types of language change, motivations for it, and models to describe it. You will be challenged to create high-quality research outputs that advance knowledge, and hone qualitative and quantitative analytic skills that will be essential to your dissertation and other linguistic work.