What is 'meaning' as it relates to words and sentences? How is the meaning of a sentence affected by the context it is produced in? These are the fundamental issues you will address in this module. You will examine the relationship between what is said and what is meant, with the first part of the course looking at basic issues in Semantics. The second part of the course will examine the distinction between a speaker's words and what a speaker means by those words – the domain of pragmatics.

How do we receive and recognise speech? How are words and concepts stored in our mind? Building on your knowledge of Psycholinguistics gained in earlier modules, the focus of this module is on language processing. You will study how humans learn, represent, comprehend, and produce language. Topics covered include visual and auditory recognition of words, sentence comprehension, sentence production, language acquisition, and the neural representation of language. You will also have the opportunity to gain some practical experience with the elaboration of a research poster.

The aim of this module is to examine language variation according to social, contextual and linguistic factors. You will look at how language is actually used, how people feel about it, and how the two are often opposed – including how the structure of language interacts with both. You will consider language as a resource to convey cultural and personal identity, and what it reveals of language attitudes and social structure, and therefore of status and inequality in areas such as social class, gender, age, and ethnicity. You will explore how social identity illuminates variation in language, and cover topics such as regional and social dialects, language rights, and language variation and change.

This module focuses on the issue of sex differentiated patterns in sociolinguistic research. In particular you will review the findings of research within the quantitative sociolinguistic paradigm, and critically discuss the major explanations that have been proposed by various scholars in the field. A smaller part of the module is dedicated to the findings from research that focuses on gender differentiation at the level of discourse/conversation.

Interested in how people make use of social media to construct identities for themselves? Curious about how media is used to disseminate political messages? Explore how language is used for different purposes within and across a range of mass and social media. Through this module you’ll examine how language is used in such contexts as electronically-mediated communication (EMC), political speeches, interviews and mass media more broadly.

Interested in how people make use of social media to construct identities for themselves? Curious about how media is used to disseminate political messages? Explore how language is used for different purposes within and across a range of mass and social media. Through this module you’ll examine how language is used in such contexts as electronically-mediated communication (EMC), political speeches, interviews and mass media more broadly.

This module explores the different contexts language teachers find themselves in and how this affects teaching practice and course structures. You learn how to develop and enhance materials and appropriate activities in order to get the best from your students.y learning.