Required core courses for the major

LIN 3041. Introduction to Linguistics I. This course examines what is language and introduces phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics.

LIN 3042. Introduction to Linguistics II. Pre-requisite: LIN 3041. This course continues the examination of language, focusing on the differences between human language and animal communication, first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and computational linguistics.

LIN 4201. Sounds of the World’s Languages. Pre-requisite: LIN 3041. This course covers sounds and sound patterns in the world’s languages, focusing on sounds occurring both in majority and minority languages, with a special attention to those attested only in certain language families or used for special purposes.

LIN 4512. Introduction to Syntax. Pre-requisite: LIN 3041. This course is an introduction to syntax, that is, the study of the structure of sentences. This course approaches syntax from the perspective of generative grammar and focuses on central topics in syntactic theory (Phrase Structure, X’-schema, θ-Theory, Case, Movement and Binding Theory).

LIN 4600. Sociolinguistics. Prerequisite: LIN 3041. This course explores language in its social context. It focuses on the study of language as a means of communication and expression of identity, as the identity of the speaker and of the speech community define the choice of the language.

LIN 4623. Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism. This course explores the relationship between language and cognition in individuals who speak and understand more than one language. It examines issues such as spoken language processing, written language processing, language acquisition and the bilingual brain.

Elective courses

Please see below for a list of elective courses. Other courses may be accepted in consultation with the coordinator and advisor of Linguistics. Students who would like to pursue a B.S. will take at least two of the elective courses marked with #

ARA 4XXX. Introduction to Arabic Linguistics. This course focuses on the study of Arabic as a language system, providing a concise overview of its sound system (phonology), word structure (morphology, roots and patterns in particular), and phrases and sentence structures (syntax). This course also discusses the history of Arabic and the frequently debated issue of diglossia in Arabic-speaking countries, as well as the main linguistic features of FusHa (Standard Arabic) and Ammiya (today's modern dialects of Arabic).

COP 3035#. Introduction to Programming Using Python. This course includes Python basics, use of Python control and data structures, use of Python functions, Python I/O, and implementation of basic Python programming tasks.

EXP 4640. Psychology of Language. This course focuses on the mental processes involved in language use (e.g., speech, comprehension, conversation, and writing).

ITA 4930. Historical Romance Linguistics. This course focuses on the interconnectedness of the Romance languages through detailed linguistic analysis of phonological, morphological and syntactic changes in the development from Latin into various Romance varieties.

LIN 2004. World Languages. This course provides an overview of the wide diversity of the languages of the world. It will familiarize you with the main concepts and themes in linguistics, as well as methods used in linguistic analysis. The course includes brief guest lectures by experts in different languages. Topics include endangered languages, language contact, language and culture, sign language, and constructed languages. This course fulfills FSU’s Diversity requirement. 

LIN 3xxx#. Research Methods in Linguistics. This course introduces students to specific research methodologies and statistical procedures used in quantitative experimental research on language. It will provide students with the means to critically evaluate quantitative research in any area of language studies and the basic tools to design and carry out a data-based research project.

LIN 3xxx#. Programming for Linguistics. This course covers the basics of Python programming, with a strong practical component focusing on problems of relevance to linguistics. Students will learn about best practices, common data types and operations, control structures, debugging, and some advanced topics like error handling and objects. No prior programming knowledge is required.

LIN 3108. Introduction to East Asian Linguistics. This course introduces linguistic features of the Chinese and Japanese languages and cognitive aspects of sentence processing of these two languages.

LIN 4030. Introduction to Historical Linguistics. This course introduces students to linguistic families, the comparative method, internal reconstruction, and the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. Several theories of sound change are also discussed.

LIN 4040. Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics. Pre-requisite: LIN 3041. This course provides an understanding of the organization of language, provides tools and techniques for describing language data, and examines various models of linguistic description.

LIN 4716#. Child Language Acquisition. This course offers an introduction to the study of child language acquisition and development in both the monolingual and bilingual setting. The goal of the course is to better understand the linguistic, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and neuro-linguistic dimensions of language acquisition.

LIN 4xxx#. Topics in Linguistics: Corpus Linguistics. Corpus linguistics is concerned with linguistic databases, often made up of textual data, with or without annotations. Linguists use those databases to gain insights, through qualitative and quantitative analyses, or as the basis for training machine learning models. This course gives an overview of existing resources, synchronic and diachronic, concerning various linguistic levels, including phonetics and phonology, morpho-syntax, and semantics. Moreover, the course covers the topics of corpus creation, curation, analysis, as well as the basic tools needed for those steps, especially basic R and Python.

LIN 4xxx#. Second Language Acquisition. Pre-requisite: LIN 3041. In this course, students will be introduced to a wide range of theories and key constructs within the field of second language acquisition (SLA). Students will also become familiarized with SLA research methods and data analysis procedures.

LIN 4xxx. Discourse and Pragmatics. This course investigates how critical discourse techniques are derived from various disciplinary fields and explores the analytical tools that address issues about relations of class, gender and culture in everyday conversation, including conversation markers, coherence, transcription theory and practice, turn-taking, adjacency pairs, repair, identity construction, politeness theory, and conversational style.

LIN 4811. The Semiotics of Emoji. This course examines emojis as a social practice and explores the different functions of language in social media that facilitate intercultural interactions. It studies theories of visual rhetoric and semiotics to understand how emojis have become a communication revolution.

LIN 4930r. Topics in Linguistics. Special topics in linguistics, including language and culture, language policy, and the globalization of language.

LIN 4905r. Directed Individual Study. In this course, students arrange with individual faculty members to undertake specialized study in areas outside of or in addition to the regular curriculum. May be repeated to a maximum of six semester hours.

MAC 2311#. Calculus with Analytic Geometry I. This course covers polynomial, trigonometric, exponential, and logarithmic functions; first and second derivatives and their interpretations; definition and interpretation of the integral; differentiation rules; implicit differentiation; applications of the derivative; anti-derivatives; fundamental theorem of calculus.

MAD 2104#. Discrete Mathematics I. This course covers techniques of definition and logical argument, sets and functions, propositional logic, introduction to graphs and relations, and applications.

PHI 3220. Introduction to Philosophy of Language. This course explores major philosophical contributions to the understanding of language and its functions in communication. Discussion of the concepts of meaning, truth, reference, understanding, and interpretation. Readings include classics of 20th century philosophy.

RUS 4840. History of the Russian Literary Language. This course studies the development of the phonological and grammatical systems from the earliest records to the present.

SPN 4700. Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics. This course examines the origin, development and present-day variation of the Spanish language and provides an introduction to Spanish linguistics from a theoretical and empirical point of view.

SPN 4701. Spanish Second Language Acquisition. This course explores the cognitive processes involved in the acquisition of a second language in adult learners, and provides a detailed understanding of acquisition theories and the various pedagogical interventions available to teach a second language.

SPN 4810. Bilingualism in the Spanish-speaking World. This course explores bilingualism with an emphasis on bilingual communities in Spain, Spanish America, and the United States.

SPN 4840. History of the Spanish Language. This course examines the origin and development of Spanish in the context of Indo-European and Romance languages, explores the linguistic changes that took place from Latin to Spanish, and compares them to those undergone by related (co)dialects and languages.

SPN 4930r. Studies in Hispanic Language. Special topics in Hispanic language and linguistics, including Spanish in the US and Spanish sociolinguistics.

STA 2122#. Introduction to Applied Statistics. This course covers normal distributions, sampling variation, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, one-way and two-way analysis of variance, correlation, simple and multiple regression, contingency tables and chi-square tests, and non-parametric statistics.

Please contact Dr. Antje Muntendam (amuntendam@fsu.edu) or Dr. Lara Reglero (lreglero@fsu.edu) for more information.