These are some of the issues mentioned in class that you can
address in your presentations. Provided they are related to
linguistics/grammar, you can also address other issues you
find interesting
Possible Topics:
1. Think of other types of “language” (i.e. computer language,
traffic code, etc). How do they differ from human language?
2. Non-verbal language, Animal communication
3. Find about language universals. Look for examples
4. Do men and women really speak different? What are the
differences? Do all authors agree?
5. Find about the different varieties of English? Why is there a
political debate about Standard English? Which English should be
taught? What is “Globish”?
6. Translation and interpreting. Difficulties, i.e in relation to language
varieties, etc
7. How does oral language differ from written language? Which
should be studied/ described? What are the different writing
systems? Why is there a mismatch between written English and
the sounds of English?
8. Discussion: Where and how should grammar be taught (or should
it be taught at all)? Could prescriptive grammar be useful for
teaching? In your experience, comparing you teachers of Spanish
and English, how shows a greater tendency to use prescriptive
grammar? Have they been useful to you as a learner? Would you
use them as a future teacher?
9. Semantics: i.e word meaning relations among words (how to
classify words in terms of their semantic relations: antonyms,
synomyms, homonyms…), lexical primitives, dictionaries, types of
dictionaries, etc.
Semantics is concerned with meaning in general. You can
investigate how meaning can be conveyed not only with words but
also via the combination of images and language (as in posters
and ads). These texts are called “multimodal”. There are many
things about multimodality on the Internet and also on the
library.
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