Linguistics Courses

Dr. Elizabeth Kissling offers several courses in linguistics, all taught in Spanish. All these courses count towards the linguistics minor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.

LAIS 411 Bilingualism in the US, Latin America, and Spain
Examines phenomena related to societal bilingualism (e.g. language shift, policies, and education) in various communities within the US, Latin America, and Spain, as well as phenomena related to individual bilingualism (e.g. acquisition, processing, and code switching).

LAIS 412 The Sounds of Spanish
In this course students learn about salient differences between the sound systems of English and Spanish in order to improve their pronunciation of Spanish. Students learn how sounds are represented in the mind and why first languages impact accent in second languages. Students analyze a variety of regional and social dialects in order to improve their aural comprehension as well as understand the social significance of language variation and how language is used to craft identities. Students carry out original research projects in sociophonetics.

LAIS 397 Special Topics: Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics
This course offers an introduction to Hispanic linguistics, investigating four main areas of linguistic analysis applied to the Spanish language: physical sounds (phonetics) and their properties as mental categories (phonology); word formation (morphology); sentence structure (syntax); and discourse and variation (historical linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics).