HENB01481U English - Elective Subject, topic 1: Topics in English Linguistics: Linguistic Anthropology, The Language of Humor, and English Online

Linguistic Anthropology (Dorte Lønsmann)

Linguistic anthropology is the study of language as social action. Linguistic anthropology draws on principles and methods from linguistics, anthropology and ethnography in the study of cultural values and interactional practices within social groups. This part of the course will cover central concepts and fields of study including speech communities and communities of practice, language acquisition and language socialization, language ideologies, language and gender, language and ethnicity and language and power. In addition, this part of the course will introduce students to methods of data collection and data analysis used in linguistic anthropology.

The Language of Humor (Kim Ebensgaard Jensen)

Language is integral to many types of expression of humor and thus it makes sense to study humor in a linguistic perspective. Students will be introduced to basic theories of language and humor as we explore the linguistic inner workings of humorous phenomena such as puns, dad jokes, wordplay, irony, sarcasm, and comedic sketches. We will apply theory and methodology from branches of linguistics such as pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, and phonology/phonetics as well as insights from related fields such as psychology and sociology in the study of humor as expressed in the English language. Students will actively contribute to the course in a weekly bring-your-own-joke segment in which students collect data in the form of authentic and genuine expressions of humor in English which will be analyzed in class with a view to increasing our understanding of the language of humor.

English Online (Kim Ebensgaard Jensen)

This course introduces students to Internet Linguistics, which is the scientific study of how English is used online. English is undergoing rapid development in online context with new varieties and new practices of communication emerging in online contexts and even seeping into offline language use. Because of this fact, the study of English in online contexts is crucial to the contemporary English student’s understanding of the English language. In this course, then, we will investigate the use of English in blog posts, on social media and other genres of communication on the Internet. Moreover, we will study some of the linguistic features of what is sometimes called Internet English, and we will discuss topics such as linguistic variation, speech communities, and socio-semantic processes as online phenomena.