Course for international guest/part time students
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities
- Organization
- BTK Department of English Linguistics
- Code
- BBI-FLN11-101E
- Title
- Introduction to Linguistics
- Usual semester
- Autumn
- Published semester
- 2026/27/1
- ECTS
- 3
- Language
- en
- Description
- Code for non-international students start with BBN
- Learning outcomes
- The course offers a short glimpse of the main concerns of linguistics and the most general issues in the study of language. Hopefully, it also dispels some of the misconceptions and naive beliefs about both language and linguistics.
- Course content
- The lectures survey diverse fields of linguistics: the languages of the world and the place of English among them; change and variation in language; Universal Grammar and the related issue of the similarities and differences between languages; the relation of language and thought; the problem of language acquisition. The course looks at sounds, words, phrases and sentences, meaning and pragmatics. The lectures describe these compartments of linguistic science, familiarizing students with notions of structure and with the hierarchical (vs linear) and digital (vs analog) nature of language. Introduced are distribution, variation, different levels of analysis, transcription, and some of the tools of phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic analysis, as well as ways of representing linguistic structure. Introducing the basics, the course also shows some of the main stages in the history of linguistics, in order that some of the controversies and open issues facing linguistic science may be highlighted.
- Assessment method
- Written multiple choice examination at the end of the term.
- Bibliography
- Introduction to English Linguistics by László Varga, ELTE 2010