Knowledge and understanding: Acquire familiarity with the notion of language, understood as a cognitive capacity and object of empirical and theoretical inquiry; acquire familiarity with the principal categories of linguistic analysis; Acquire familiarity with the notions of phone and phoneme; acquire familiarity with the principal categories of phonetic and phonological analysis, with particular attention to Italian.

Apply knowledge and understanding: Acquire familiarity with the principal empirical methods and theoretical models of contemporary linguistics and develop the capacity to apply these methods and models to actual linguistic facts; acquire working competence of the technical jargon of the discipline; Apply knowledge and understanding: Acquire familiarity with the principal empirical methods and theoretical models of contemporary phonetics and phonology and develop the capacity to apply these methods and models to actual linguistic facts; acquire working competence of the technical jargon of the discipline.

Making judgments: Develop the capacity to identify and define, consciously and autonomously, issues relevant to linguistic analysis and to formulate research questions and potential approaches, empirical and/or theoretical, to address them; sviluppare la capacità di identificare e delimitare in modo autonomo e consapevole problemi di analisi fonetica e fonologica e di formulare domande di ricerca e potenziali approcci empirici e/o teorici per affrontarle.

Communication skills: Acquire the technical terminology of the discipline and learn how to use it appropriately to describe linguistic facts, empirical methods, and analytic approaches.

Learning skill: Acquire basic knowledge of the conceptual and practical tools that are essential to linguistic inquiry in the broadest sense; learn how to transfer the knowledge acquired in the course to other domains; Acquire basic knowledge of the conceptual and practical tools that are essential to phonetic and phonological inquiry in the broadest sense; learn how to transfer the knowledge acquired in the course to other domains.

None

The course offers an introduction to the empirical study of language and to phonetics and phonology:
1. Introduction to the notion of language, understood as a cognitive capacity and object of empirical inquiry.
2. Introduction to the notion of grammar, understood not as a normative model but as a system of combination of lexemes and grammatical categories and, in an even broader sense, as a logical limit to possible languages.
3. Introduction to the most characterizing properties of natural language grammars (such as recursion, structure dependency, and locality).
4. Introduction to the empirical and theoretical foundations of contemporary linguistics.
5. Introduction to linguistic sounds and their articulatory properties.
6. Introduction to IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) and phonetic transcription.
7. Introduction to phonology; the distinction between phones and phonemes; allophony and free variation; phonological features; phonological rules.
8. Introduction to the syllable and some other sopra-segmental facts relevant to Italian.

G. GRAFFI, S. SCALISE, Le lingue e il linguaggio, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2013, capp. I, II e IV, VII

- Introduction to the notion of natural language
- Introduction to the specific properties of natural language, among which discretness, double articulation, and recursion.
- Structure dependency; distinction between "languages" and "Language"; universal grammar as selection of combinatorial possibilities.
- Nature and nurture.
- The paradox of linguistic knowledge; written and spoken language; abstract and concrete; langue and parole; competence and performance.
- The different dimensions of linguistic competence: phonetics and morphology.
- Examples of morphological, syntactic and semantic competence in Italian. Language as a code.
- Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations; signifier and signified; diachrony and sinchrony; language functions and language stratification.
- Introduction to articulatory phonetics; articulation of consonants; consontants in the international phonetic alphabeth
- Articulation of vowels; vowels in the international phonetic alphabeth; phonetic trascription; comparison between phones and graphemes in Italian
- Phentics and phonology; Trubeckoj's rules; contrastive distribution; free variants; allophony and complementary distribution.
- Phonological rules; formal representation of phonetic rules; types of phonetic rules; super-segmental phenomena.

Lectures are frontal and interactive, with the use of slides in Power Point (or compatible format) designed by the teacher. All lectures will be held in person.

Power Point presentations will be available to students on Microsoft Teams.

Students will undergo a single written exam comprising 7 open questions (4 for Glottologia e Linguistica, 7 for Fonetica e Fonologia). The exam will be 1 hour and 30 minutes long. The questions will assess competence in the use of the correct terminology, knowledge of the contents discussed in class and in the textbook, as detailed above, as well as the capacity to apply autonomously the theoretical models discussed in the course to actual linguistic facts. A sufficient score (18/30) requires students to demonstrate acceptable familiarity with the disciplinary contents and the analytical methods. An excellent score (30, 30 e lode) is given to students who demonstrate an excellent grasp of the disciplinary contents, autonomy in applying analytical methods, as well as fluency and precision in using the technical jargon of the discipline.

This course explores topics closely related to one or more goals of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDGs)