GENERAL LINGUISTICS

The course aims at providing the students with the basic methodological tools for linguistic analysis and crosslinguistic comparison, by developing the ability of reflecting on the phonological, morphological and syntactic properties of one's mother tongue.

The main educational goal of the course is to provide students with the basic tools for linguistic analysis and crosslinguistic comparison. The course is meant as an introduction to the formal analysis of language through the conscious reflection on the grammatical properties of one's mother tongue, with particular reference to the phonological, morphological and syntactic modules of grammar.

No pre-requisite is required.

Universal grammar: innatism and language acquisition; the faculty of language and the principles-parameters theory.
The articulation of the sounds of Italian.
Phone, phoneme and allophone.
The distinctive features and the supersegmental properties.
The main phonological phenomena.
The internal structure of the syllable.
Morpheme and allomorph, types of morphemes.
The morphological processes of composition and derivation.
Interpretive properties and restrictions on word-formation rules.
The notion of constituent and the constituency tests.
The X-bar theory and the internal structure of phrases.
The thematic theory and the internal structure of the verbal phrase.
The structure of the main clause and of the subordinate clause.

Cecchetto, C., "Introduzione alla sintassi", LED - Milano, 2002, chapters 1,2,3.
Graffi, G., Scalise, S., "Le lingue e il linguaggio - Introduzione alla linguistica" Fourth edition, Il Mulino - Bologna, 2024, chapters 1,2,4,5,7.

The checking of the learning results will be performed through the administration of a written test lasting 90 minutes. The student will be required to provide, among else, the phonetic and phonological transcription of some Italian words, the morphological decomposition of some complex Italian words, the phrase structure of some Italian sentences.

written

The final mark is determined by adding the score obtained by the student for each question.

Traditional classes with in person attendance.