LING 2750 - Introduction to Language and Culture

• Students will be able to explain how etymology helps us understand world language families and how cultural practices are transmitted through language.
• Students will be able to analyze how conceptual metaphors vary from language to language and what that tells us about the underlying culture.
• Students will be able to analyze how different languages influence the way we perceive and act in the world with respect to color, smell, and taste words together with spatial metaphors of time.
• Students will be able to describe how cultures differ in terms of how they mark social relationships through the use of address terms such as honorifics, pronouns, and nicknames.
• Students will be able to describe how cultures have developed different semantic classification systems (for example, the classification of food) for the same real world objects.
• Students will be able to describe how etymology especially the derivation of many food words illuminates the socio-economic and historical impact on cultures of patterns of world trade, migration, and colonialism.
• Students will be able to describe the much larger role played by non-arbitrary language in the form of ideophones in non-Indo-European languages.
• Students will be able to discuss how the language used to express everyday speech acts such as greetings, refusals, and offers of food, vary from culture to culture and reveal different cultural norms of behavior.
• Students will be able to identify code switching and language crossing as manifestations of the inter-relationship of individual, linguistic and cultural identity.
• Students will be able to articulate insights about the interconnectedness of language and culture in their discourse community and those of others with regard to cultural rules and biases.
• Students will be able to demonstrate an understanding of the complexity of elements that contribute to a particular language and culture with regard to its history, values, politics, communication styles, economy, or beliefs and practices.
• Students will be able to ask complex questions about other cultures and languages and to articulate answers to these questions that reflect multiple cultural perspectives.
• Studnts will be able to initiate and develop interactions with others who come from other cultures while suspending judgment in valuing his / her interactions with linguistically and culturally different others.