Undergraduate Courses

Introduction to articulatory and acoustic phonetics. Investigation of the physiological properties of our speech apparatus. Discussion of the physical properties of sound waves and their component parts that figure in linguistic description. Training in reliable identification, transcription and production of sounds in various languages.

Analysis of the structure of words and introduction to their modeling. Description of the components of a word: roots, stems, affixes, clitics, tone, stress. Analysis of word types, derivation, declension, and conjugation systems seen in typologically distinct languages. Practical application of the methodology to data in various languages.

Introduction to the major language families of the world and to the study of language classification according to structural properties.Examination of the diversity and similarity among languages in terms of their syntactic, morphological and phonological characteristics. Comparison of the distribution of structural patterns within genetically related and unrelated languages.

Analysis of the organization and structure of discourse in both written and spoken texts; focus on grammatical components of discourse including sentence structure, information structure, and intonation. Study of text structure from the perspective of cohesion and coherence, rhetoric and genre features.

Analysis of the basic structure of sentences and their meaning in contemporary Turkish. Description of functional sentence types: statements, questions, exclamations, orders, wishes. Analysis of the components of a sentence and the relations between them in terms of predicate-argument structure, grammatical functions, thematic roles and pragmatic prominence. Description of subordination and its types.

Introduction to diachronic linguistics. Focus on types of language change, methods of linguistic reconstruction of extinct languages, the notion of language family/genetic relation, models of language change, internal and external factors in language chan

Study of the ways in which language serves to define and maintain group identity and social relationships among speakers. Discussion of regional and social variation in language, the relationship between language use and variables such as gender, ethnicity, social class and age. Discussion of bilingualism, language contact and language planning.

Investigation of the structure of Turkish Sign Language (TİD) in the context of sign language linguistics. Focusing on the similarities and differences between sign and spoken languages, in particular, on the comparative issues concerning the visual/spatial modality and the oral/aural modality. Discussion of the differences in the simultaneous expression of layers of meaning in sign languages versus the effect of linearization in spoken languages. Study of grammars of sign languages in terms of the system of distinctive features (phonology), morphology, syntax, and semantics.

Exploring connections between language use and gender/sex systems. Introduction to a variety of sociolinguistic concepts such as style, dialect, speech community, conversation analysis and politeness.

Aimed at introducing students to data collection and evaluation methods of empirical and theoretical research in the field of general linguistics, dialectology, and language variability.

Comparative study of the main linguistic properties of the Turkic language family. Classification of sub-groups of the language family in terms of lexical, phonological, morphological and syntactic characteristics. Investigation of the differences and similarities in sound inventories, vowel harmony, affix ordering, word order, and the lexicon.

General overview of current theories of morphology. Studying the central concepts of morphological analysis and how these are characterised in frameworks such as Prosodic Morphology, Word-and-Paradigm Morphology, Distributed Morphology, Parallel Morphology, Natural Morphology. Comparative analysis of selected morphological data in those models.

Introduction to the basic concepts of truth-conditional compositional semantic analysis. Analyzing natural language meaning with the tools of set theory and first- and higher-order logic. Analysis of quantificational constructions, scope ambiguity and scope rigidity. Discussion of the meanings of tense/aspect markers, quantificational adverbs, and modals.