Università Roma Tre

- Linguistics, as a science of language and thought.
- The rise of linguistics. Historical linguistics. General linguistics.
- Semiotic foundations of language. Design features.
- Using the language device: the theory of Speech Acts, the theory of implicatures. Persuading: the need to know how the device is shaped. Intonation and politeness. Sociolinguistic choices.
Linguistic and present-day comunication: linguistic strategies of persuasive communication. The grammar of persuasion.
Linguistics and society: rights, linguistic deprivation, variational linguistics.
- Linguistics and the languages of the world.
- Phonetics; phonetic transcription. Italian and English phonetics.
- Phonology. Phonemes and allophones. Phonological oppositions. Phonological rules. The syllable. Suprasegmental features. Intonation, illocution and Information Structure.
- The lexicon. The Word. Word classes.
- Morphology. Morphemes and allomorphs. Types of morphemes and morphological typology. Inflexion. Word formation: derivation and composition.
- Syntax. Structure. Head and modifier. Basic word order. Argument structure. The ergative parameter.
- Semantics. What is meaning. Types of meanings. Ordering schemes for meanings. The delimitation of meanings: traditional categories and prototypes.
- Pragmatics. Macropragmatics: speech acts and conversational implicatures. Micropragmatics: Information Structure of the utterance.
- Interfaces between levels. The phonology-morphology interface: the loss of inflections, metaphony. The morphology-syntax interface: inflection and word order. The syntax-pragmatics interface: marked constructions and informational stress.
- Linguistics, knowledge and culture.
- Linguistics, man and the brain: what are we? Linguistic universals. Implicational universals. Explaining language universals. An example: two kinds of memory, and the "magical nunber seven".
- Diachronical linguistics and the past: history, archaeology, philology. Language change. Phonetic change. Morphological change. Semantic change. The "laws" of linguistic change. Words and Things: linguistic reconstruction and cultural reconstruction. The interpretation of texts.

- E. Lombardi Vallauri, La linguistica in pratica. Bologna, Il Mulino, 2013.