yole's journey in languages

Now that the exams are over and the grades are coming in, I think it’s a good time to recap my first semester as a pre-master student of linguistics at Leiden University. While my previous post was focused on my personal experience as a student in my forties, now I’d like to talk about the courses I took and the projects I did during the semester.

The Language and Communication course covers pragmatics – the area of linguistics that focuses on the implied meaning of communication. This includes understanding context, politeness, metaphor and similar aspects. This was the area of linguistics I knew the least about before the course, and I really enjoyed learning about it.

The Phonology course is about the concepts of phonemes and allophones, features, phonological rules (how sounds change in specific contexts), syllables and stress. A few years ago I almost randomly bought a book called “Generative Phonology”; I managed to only get through a part of it, but it was mostly the part the course covered, so I was already acquainted with the material. Of course, studying the material in detail, with all the exercises, gives you much more than reading through a dense book once. And this course was the most immediately useful in that I was able to directly integrate a lot of the material (phoneme features and the SPE notation for phonological rules) into Etymograph.

The Language Typology course consisted of two main parts: the process of writing a grammar for a language and the ways in which languages of the world can differ from each other in terms of phonetics, morphology and syntax. The course didn’t cover as much material as I had hoped, but it was still a very useful overview. For the final project, each group of 7-8 people got a bunch of grammars of languages from the same part of the world (ours was North America) and had to record a 7-minute video talking about how they are typologically similar and different. This was initially quite challenging, but in the end I think that our video turned out quite well, and the experience of preparing a script and filming is definitely a transferable skill.

The Sociolinguistics course was… meh. I find the discipline itself very interesting and also extremely relevant for understanding a lot of things going on in the world right now. However, the way the course was taught didn’t really resonate with me; we had to study theory on our own from a book, and the lectures mostly covered various sociolinguistics researches and often went too much into irrelevant detail.

I’m also not too happy with our course project (we did it in a group, but the research question and the methodology were based on my suggestions, so the shortcomings are also on me.) The key idea of our project was showing that use of English by second-language (L2) learners and speakers is nowadays much more heavily influenced by online communication and not as much by norms taught in the classroom, and this is visible not only in obvious ways (the use of slang, for example), but also in the use of not-quite-normative but not marked grammar, such as ‘try and’ instead of ‘try to’. To show this, we relied primarily on data from Reddit, and I wrote a script to analyze it. The idea is legit, but we could have done a much better job arguing for it if we also used the data from the L2 learner corpora – unfortunately, when we were planning the study, I wasn’t aware of how much data of this type was available, so we didn’t look at it.

The Academic Skills course basically taught you to write an academic paper, and you worked on your paper during the entire semester. It turned out that I didn’t have as much to learn there as I had thought, but all in all it was fun (partly because it’s a course specifically for pre-master students, and you get to know people studying other disciplines). For my paper, I focused on one aspect of the research on Lord’s Prayer translation collections that I was doing earlier last year: the collection of Andreas Müller and the errors that it contains. The paper got some really positive feedback from the teacher, so I decided to post it on academia.edu in the hope that someone else finds it interesting.

Finally, I audited the Hittite course, which wasn’t part of the standard pre-master program, with an extra dose of Hieroglyphic Luwian. This was quite challenging but also very fun and useful. I don’t know if I’ll do much with Anatolian languages such as Hittite, but having studied the language helps a lot with understanding references to Hittite in the broader context of Indo-European studies.

Besides all that, I was quite active in our study association. We launched the Web site and opened the call for papers for our student conference (if you’re a student of linguistics in Leiden, please consider submitting your research!), and I wrote an article on Thaana, the writing system used on the Maldives, for our quarterly magazine.

That’s it I think 🙂 The next semester will be even more busy – I’m taking not one but three extra courses on top of the program, and I’ll be working on my thesis, for which I already have a topic and an advisor. But more on that later.