Course Descriptions

This course provides a survey of classical English grammar. It covers word classes, roles of constructing phrases, clauses, and sentences in English. Challenging areas of English grammar such as passive, tense, aspect, participles, gerunds, will be studied in detail. Finally, aspects of grammar pertinent to teaching English as a foreign language will be studied. A substantial portion of the course will consist of exploring rules of grammar in students' own writing and editing.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours

An introduction to the findings, theories and methods of modern structural linguistics. Includes phonetics, phonology, word-formation, syntax, and semantics. Basic analytical skills are emphasized. Examples will be drawn from a wide variety of natural languages.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours

An introduction to first and second language acquisition, language in society, world languages and animal communication. The human biological propensity to acquire language and language universals are considered.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 111.3 or LING 114.3.

Drawing on the examples of language technologies that we use frequently, this course focuses on two aspects of language use in the digital era: What language technologies are available, and how these technologies are shaping our language use (e.g., new communication styles, new semiotic resources, and new genres). This course also offers a window into popular language technologies such as spell and grammar checkers, automated speech recognition, machine translation, chatbots (e.g., Siri, Alexa), plagiarism detection, and intelligent language learning tutors. This course does not require previous knowledge of programing or computational algorithms.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours

Advanced introduction to traditional, structural, and transformational models of grammar. Emphasizes recent trends in linguistic analysis and theory. Natural language data will be analyzed extensively.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours and 1 Practicum/Lab hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 110, or LING 111, or permission of the department.

Introduces articulatory phonetics, the structure and functioning of the vocal tract, the major classes of speech sounds and systems of phonetic notation. A brief discussion of acoustic and perceptual phonetics will be given. Recognition, production and notation of speech sounds and the preliminaries of phonological analysis will be emphasized.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours and 1 Practicum/Lab hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 111.

Investigates the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed. Material from a wide variety of languages is drawn upon to explore morphological processes, their relationship to syntactic structures, and to language typology. Practical work in morphological analysis is emphasized.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 111.

Presents language in its social context, covering aspects of linguistic variation within and across speech communities. Topics include language and class, gender, age, speech context and ethnicity. Language standardization, code-switching, bilingualism and diglossia, rules of conversation and appropriate address, and societal features of language change will be discussed.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s):LING 111; and one of LING 112, SOC 111, SOC 112, WGST 210, or 6 credit units of ARBC, CHIN, CREE, FREN, GERM, GRK, HEB, HNDI, JPNS, LATN, RUSS, SNSK, SPAN or UKR courses.

General Lexicology is one of the basic courses of theoretical linguistics. This course addresses fundamental issues of general lexicology and lexicography. It provides understanding of the lexis as a systemic whole, its development, latest theories about the processes. The course focuses on the basic unit of the language word (lexeme), its structure, meaning, etymology, variants. The word is viewed in three aspects: structural, semantic and functional. There is thorough treatment of word-formation, its historical development, semantic and morphological aspects. Much attention is paid to phraseology. Lexicographical issues cover entries, dictionary types and size, explanations, translation, computer dictionaries, databases. The course will also dwell upon aspects of stylistics from the lexicological point of view. Examples will come from many languages including English, German, Russian, Italian, Estonian, etc.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 111 and LING 112.

Gives an overview of six most influential languages of the world: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese. The course explores the main concepts of geographical linguistics, factors that make a language influential, globalization and language ideology, the language life cycle and the role of globalization in language obsolescence. The focus will be on the spread of each of these languages in two aspects: geographical-historical (the origins of the languages, their spread in space and time) and socio-cultural (linguistic variation, language as national identity marker). A considerable portion of time will be devoted to the linguistic portraying of these languages: characterization of their typological features on the levels of phonology, grammar and syntax, as well as study of fragments constituting their different linguistics pictures of the world.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s):LING 111; and LING 112 or 6 credit units ARBC, CHIN, CREE, FREN, GERM, GRK, HEB, HNDI, JPNS, LATN, RUSS, SNSK, SPAN or UKR courses.

The course provides an overview of second language acquisition theories. It considers views on the nature of language learning, on first and second language acquisition and native/non-native language processing.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 111 and LING 112.

This course provides an overview of the major varieties of English. Different geographical varieties of English will be addressed and discussed with respect to core components of their phonology, phonetics, morphology, lexicon, and sentence structure. The course also examines factors in the development of language variation such as language change, language planning, migration, language contact, and second language teaching.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 110.3 or LING 111.3 or 24 credit units at the university level

This course provides learners with an understanding of the challenges in communication across cultures, ethnicities and social groups; and of managing these challenges. Intercultural communication considers patterns of interaction across cultures, social attitudes, thought patterns employed by individuals from different socio-cultural backgrounds to produce and interpret messages. While examples are drawn from a variety of world regions, the course will focus predominantly on the comparison of Canadian/North American and Asian (China, Japan, Russia, Middle East countries) communication patterns. This course will help Canadian born students as well as international and immigrant students to function better in a multicultural environment and develop their intercultural communication skills.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 111; or 24 credit units of university courses; or 6 credit units ARBC, CHIN, CREE, FREN, GERM, GRK, HEB, HNDI, JPNS, LATN, RUSS, SNSK, SPAN, or UKR courses.

This course provides an overview of linguistic and linguo-cultural landscape of Canada. The three groups of Canadian languages are investigated: national languages of Canada (Canadian English and its dialectal varieties, Canadian French and its dialectal varieties), heritage languages of Canada (examples will be drawn from a variety of languages), and Aboriginal languages of Canada (by linguistic group and by region). The language-culture correspondences will be explored.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 111 or 24 credit units of university courses.

This course provides an overview of the linguistic landscape of the indigenous languages of Canada and North America. We will begin with the indigenous perspective of the origin, properties, and relations between languages and cultures and the properties of languages growing from the places of where they are spoken. We will then correspond this view with the Western linguistic perspective of language family trees and linguistic features commonly found in indigenous languages of North America. We will address the process of child language acquisition pre- and post colonialization, in particular the effects of interruptions through residential schools, forced assimilation, and foster care. A second major topic in this course will be on the linguistic and cultural impact of education delivered through the lens of official bilingualism. The last major topic is the revitalization of indigenous languages in Canada and worldwide. The methods, the approaches, and the success stories will provide a varied picture of the efforts by speakers, educators, and linguistics to relieve and reverse the loss of languages and cultures.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 111, LING 112, INDG 107, CREE 101, or CREE 110.
Note: Students with credit for LING 342 may not receive credit for this course.

Offered occasionally by visiting faculty and in other special situations to cover, in depth, topics that are not thoroughly covered in regularly offered courses.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours

Offered occasionally by visiting faculty and in other special situations to cover, in depth, topics that are not thoroughly covered in regularly offered courses.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours

Basic concepts of phonology and the procedures of phonological analysis are introduced, with an emphasis on generative phonology. Data from a variety of natural languages is analyzed.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours and 1 Practicum/Lab hours
Formerly: LING 240.3
Prerequisite(s): LING 111; or permission of the department.
Note: Students with credit for LING 240 may not take this course for credit.

Will introduce advanced linguistics students to the foundations of lexical and grammatical semantics. It will also deal with the semantics-pragmatics interface and introduce students to the basics of formal semantics in order to enable them to work with computational models of language.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 241 or permission of the department.

This course provides an overview of the field of first language acquisition. It examines issues of language development from the child's birth to high school graduation. The course materials address a variety of topics in applied linguistics, such as linguistic development in infancy, acquisition of linguistic ability in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and speaking skills. Furthermore, it examines underlying factors that may lead to atypical language development and evaluates language-therapeutic approaches in addressing those factors. It also includes a practical component applying and evaluating research methodology in child language research.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Permission of the Department.
Prerequisite(s): LING 111 and LING 112

An introduction to the historical linguistics of unwritten and written languages. Topics will include genetic and topological relationship, comparative reconstruction, dialect formation, phonological, morphological and semantic change, and writing systems. The integration of linguistics with prehistory and historical ethnology will be emphasized.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 112.
Note: Students with credit for LING 246 may not take this course for credit.

The course will introduce students to conversation and discourse analysis in which language use is examined within its sociocultural context. Students will be introduced to current research paradigms such as critical discourse analysis and sociocultural theory.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 111.

Introduces students to key applied linguistic principles and criteria used in assessing and selecting materials in second/foreign language teaching. The course addresses the main types of materials available to ESL teachers and develops skills in adapting and developing materials for second/foreign language acquisition.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 111.3, LING 112.3 and 6 credit units 200, 300 or 400-level LING.

The course will introduce advanced linguistic students to the foundations of computational linguistics. Using freely available resources for natural language processing, students will be introduced to corpus linguistics, data mining, tokenizing, part-of-speech-tagging, morphological analysis and syntactic parsing.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours and 1 Practicum/Lab hours
Prerequisite(s): 6 credit units of LING or CMPT; or permission of department.
Note: Participants should have completed LING 111 and at least one other Linguistics course at 200 or 300-Level. Alternatively they should have completed at least 6 credit units of Computer Science courses.

This course provides students with an internship experience which allows them to develop a better appreciation of the relationship between their studies and potential careers routes as well as develop leadership roles in community while fostering the outreach connections between the university and community.

Prerequisite(s): Minimum 48 credit units of university study and permission of the Linguistics Program Chair.

This experiential learning course provides students with an internship experience which allows them to enhance their knowledge of applied linguistics and language learning/acquisition theory, as well as to develop some teaching skills by providing individual structured tutorial sessions.

Weekly hours: 5 Practicum/Lab hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 111.3; LING 112.3; one of LING 248.3, LING 251.3, LING 348.3; and 6 credit units LING courses at the 200-level or above.

This course provides learners with a better understanding of human communication through the studies of the linguistic subfield of Pragmatics, a discipline that examines language use in context. The core concepts examined in the course include deixis (words that cannot be understood without a specific context), presupposition; conversational implicature; speech acts; and information structure.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 111.3 and 3 credit units 200-level LING courses, or permission of the department.

This course provides an introduction to the field of communication sciences and disorders, as well as an overview of professional practice in Speech-language Pathology. It will focus on disordered communication and development, types of communication disorders, and treatment pathways. The course will begin with an overview of the profession and clients, followed by an introduction to the anatomy and physiology of the speech production mechanism. We will then investigate articulation, language, literacy, cognitive, fluency, voice, swallowing, and hearing disorders affecting communication with reference to various diagnostic and treatment options. An exploration of case studies will be used to illustrate assessment practices, identification and diagnosis, therapeutic avenues, and data measured outcomes for clients impacted by communication disorders. Time will be awarded to aspects of client and counseling, English language learners, augmentative communication systems, and ethical expectations within the field. Material will be presented through class lectures, assigned readings, and class discussions.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 111, LING 112, LING 241, and LING 242

Offered occasionally by visiting faculty and in other special situations to cover, in depth, topics that are not thoroughly covered in regularly offered courses.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours

Offered occasionally by visiting faculty and in other special situations to cover, in depth, topics that are not thoroughly covered in regularly offered courses.

Weekly hours: 3 Seminar/Discussion hours

Focuses on the relationship between language and culture. Language is represented as a tool for the expressing, storing and transmitting of some cultural elements. Examples are drawn from a variety of languages and include folk tales and narratives, popular song lyrics, spells, shamanism, mass media and everyday speech.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 111 plus either LING 112 or LING 244, and 6 credit units of senior Linguistics courses.

Helps students to develop an ability to obtain, organize, and analyze language-related experimental data. Empirical methods are explored with some attention given to data-driven quantitative methods employed in natural language analysis. The course includes language data collection, statistical analysis, language corpora, the fundamentals of automated syntactic parsing, text classification, information extraction, tagging, and summarization. Students will also benefit from learning data processing computer software packages such as R and Excel.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 112 and a minimum of 9 credit units of LING courses at the 200-level or higher.

Focuses on the role of languages in constructing and sustaining gender in different societies around the world. Students will also examine linguistic mechanisms of creating gender divisions and stereotypes, as well as remedying gender-related inequalities.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): LING 111; and LING 244 and 3 credit units of senior LING or permission of the department.

A reading course on a specialized topic combining at least two of the components of the student's program: linguistics, languages and/or literature. This course will also provide an initiation into research methods leading to a term paper.

Permission of the department and the instructor required.

Offered occasionally by visiting faculty and in other special situations to cover, in depth, topics that are not thoroughly covered in regularly offered courses.

Offered occasionally by visiting faculty and in other special situations to cover, in depth, topics that are not thoroughly covered in regularly offered courses.

Weekly hours: 3 Seminar/Discussion hours

This course will introduce graduate students to advanced concepts in conversation and discourse analysis. It will deal with concepts in pragmatics, such as speech acts, felicity conditions and the cooperative principle in conversation. The focus will then shift to discourse analysis in which language use is examined within its sociocultural context. Students will be introduced to current research paradigms such as critical discourse analysis and sociocultural theory. Finally, the implications of research findings on language teaching within a communicative framework will be discussed.

Weekly hours: 1 Lecture hours and 2 Seminar/Discussion hours
Prerequisite(s): Registration in a Graduate program.

This course introduces graduate students to the fundamentals of research methods employed in experimental linguistics and applied linguistics. The course provides the students with the understanding of research design principles and gives them hands-on experience with quantitative methods for the analysis of linguistic data. This course focuses on the analysis techniques employed in natural language data processing. The range of concepts covered in class includes automated syntactic parsing, text classification, information extraction, tagging, and summarization. The students will also benefit from learning or reinforcing their previous knowledge of some data processing computer software packages, such as SPSS or Excel.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): Registration in a Graduate program.

This course introduces students to contemporary theories of syntax and morphology, discusses their role in foreign language teaching and learning, and introduces teaching methodologies for teaching morphological and syntactic rules. We will learn about contemporary theories of syntax and morphology, such as the Minimalist Program, HPSG, LFG, and the Easier Syntax approach. After considering the role of grammar in various teaching paradigms, we will examine theories of syntactic and morphological acquisition in second language learning and consider how to integrate these theories into a modern foreign language syllabus.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): Registration in a Graduate program.

This course explores the interactions between language and culture with the focus on applied linguistic research as well as on second languge learning and teaching Canadian culture to language learners.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): Registration in a Graduate program.

This course focuses on the role of languages in constructing and sustaining gender in different societies around the world. Students will also examine linguistic mechanisms of creating gender divisions and stereotypes, as well as remedying gender-related in equalities.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): Registration in a Graduate program.

This course surveys modern sociolinguistic theories as well as methods of conducting sociolinguistic research, collecting and analyzing sociolinguistic data. The theoretical approaches include linguistic relativism, language variation, sociology of language, social psychology of language, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, and variationist sociolinguistics.

Weekly hours: 3 Lecture hours
Prerequisite(s): Registration in a Graduate program.

Offered occasionally in special situations. Students interested in these courses should contact the department for more information.

Offered occasionally in special situations. Students interested in these courses should contact the department for more information.

Students and faculty will make presentations concerning their current research. All candidates for a graduate degree must make one presentation. Attendance is required throughout the graduate program.

Students writing a Master's thesis must register for this course.

Students enrolled in Special Case PhD in Linguistics must register for this course. This course is designed to enhance the student’s knowledge of the subject area. Readings are assigned on an individual basis. The course is expected to prepare the student for writing the PhD thesis. Attendance is obligatory. The course in non-credited.