Learning Outcomes
By the end of this course:
-Students will have acquired the necessary knowledge that will allow them to process basic sociolinguistic patterns, the factors that cause them as well as their social consequences.
-They will be able to process the linguistic product in relation to the person that produces it and the conditions in which it is produced.
-They will be able to analyze the explicit and implicit meanings of the utterances depending on the time, place, social status, role of the speakers, the objective of the interaction and the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which they are uttered.
Course Content (Syllabus)
The first part of the course deals with basic principles, issues and research concerning the relationship between society and language. Specifically, sociolinguistics focuses on the social dimension of language as it examines linguistic diversity in relation to the social, political and ideological phenomena. The relationship of sociolinguistics with other related disciplines is studied, as well as phenomena of linguistic diversity and their relationship with various social factors. Therefore, the course studies issues of language change and geographical diversification of languages; the relationship of language to nation, state and national groups; the social dimensions of class, gender and age, language varieties formed according to context and social interaction, phenomena resulting from the coexistence and contact of languages (bilingualism, social diglossia), etc.
The second part of the course deals with the study of how in communication is transmitted more than what it is said. Pragmatics focuses on the analysis of what people really mean with their utterances despite what the words or expressions used in these utterances might mean themselves.
Keywords
Sociolinguistics, speakers’ characteristics, linguistic variation, language contact, language and society, pragmatics, deixis, conversational implicature, cooperative principle