This course is taught in English. No prior knowledge of Chinese is assumed.
The purpose of this course is to introduce the Chinese language to students and to engage them in critical thinking of, among others, the myths about the language that, for example, it is a "concrete" language because the vocabulary and characters of the writing system consist of concrete objects/images, and that the speakers think concretely. This course examines the structure of the language, its vocabulary, the roles of semantics and discourse, the writing system, and cultural correlates that are integral parts of the speaker's linguistic expression. Presented are also contrastive analyses of selected topics of Chinese and English, including expressions of tense and aspect, negation, conditional and counterfactual. The notion of syntactic category, grammaticalization, and the role of metaphor in the language are included, so are aspects of Chinese sociolinguistics. |