The course introduces you to the scientific
study of language. The basics of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and
semantics will be covered, so that you will begin to understand how
linguistic analysis is carried out. The emphasis will be on the analysis of the
range of structures which exist in the linguistic repertoire of a speaker in a
Caribbean Creole community.
The course also introduces you to
Sociolinguistics and the Sociology of Language, specifically to issues
concerned with
language variation, criteria for describing language situations, attitudes
toward languages and the function of particular languages in a speech
community.
The course will enable you as a teacher to make preliminary formal and functional analyses of the speech communities from which your students come.