Syllabus for Ling 101 On-Line, Continuing Education

Course Title: People and Their Language

Course Instructor:

Florian Schwarz
Professor of Linguistics
Office Address: Dept. of Linguistics, UMass, Amherst, MA 01003

Course Description:

Fulfills SB General Education requirement. This course looks at human language from two perspectives. One perspective is biological: language is a uniquely human instinct, a part of the human genome. Because language is an instinct, all human languages are, at some deep level, the same. Another, complementary perspective is social: language is an important — perhaps the most important — cultural artifact in any society. With this perspective, we will look at how and why languages and dialects differ, studying language as a force that dynamically shapes and is shaped by history, class, status, ethnicity, gender, and institutions like the media and the law. Throughout, we will also see the interplay of biological and social factors in human language.

Course Creator:

The lectures and assignments in this course are the work of Professor John McCarthy of the Linguistics Department. Professor McCarthy teaches Linguistics 101 as a regular classroom course every year. This on-line course is based on his classroom course. It is Professor McCarthy's voice that you will hear narrating the lectures.

Prerequisites:

None.

General Education Designation:

This course bears the Social and Behavioral Sciences (SB) designation of the General Education Program at UMass Amherst. It fulfills the SB requirement because it introduces students to the study of language in the individual and in society, because it looks at the relations among language, the individual, and society dynamically, and because it offers a systematic approach to human language in its individual and social aspects.

Method of Instruction:

This course is taught with a combination of on-line lectures (narrated slide shows), reading assignments, and on-line videos. Lectures and assignments may be done at any time, day or night, but there are deadlines for completing written work. All written work must be completed by noon EST on Friday, January 28.

Method of Evaluation:

The course consists of 22 lessons. Of the 22 lessons, about half include a discussion topic, which is worth up to 10 points. The other half include a homework assignment, usually a 500-word essay, which is also worth up to 10 points. It is possible, then, to earn a maximum of 220 points. Students who receive at least 90% of 220 (i.e., 198) will get an 'A'; students who receive at least 87% of 220 will get an 'AB'; and so on (i.e., 'B' at 80%, 'BC' at 77%, ...).

Reading assignments:

You should immediately obtain the required textbook, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker. This book is currently published in a Harper Perennial edition, ISBN 0060958332, available for $10.50 from http://amazon.com/. It is also frequently available as a used book in the original W. Morrow & Co. edition. The two editions are identical except for pagination. You should also be able to find this book in your local public library, since it was a New York Times non-fiction best-seller.

Other reading assignments will be available on-line.

Technical requirements:

The lectures in this course are in the form of PowerPoint presentations. To view them, you will need to download and install the free Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer for Windows. Macintosh people are on their own.

The 22 lectures for this course come in the form of compressed files that are quite large (15-35 megabytes each). If you have a fast internet connection, you can download these files from within Prometheus. (E.g., on a 128K DSL connection, a 20 megabyte file takes approximately 20 minutes, while on a 640K cable modem, it takes about four minutes.) But if you have a slower dial-up internet connection, it can take well over an hour to download just one of these files. In that case, you would be well advised to obtain the lectures on CD-ROM. Just send a request to the instructor.