Listed in: Latinx and Latin Amer Studies, as LLAS-357 | Spanish, as SPAN-357
Jeannette Sanchez-Naranjo (Section 01)
(Offered as SPAN 357 and LLAS 357) Spanish is the second-most widely spoken language in the world. With more than 400 million native speakers, it has official status in 21 countries. In the United States more than 40 million people use Spanish in their daily lives. What exactly is the Spanish language? What do you actually know when you speak Spanish? These questions are at the heart of this course. By following a bottom-up design—from smallest to largest segments of language—we will understand the basic characteristics of human language and will examine the architecture of the Spanish language: how its sounds are produced and how they combine; how its words are constructed from their component parts; how its sentences are formed; how its meanings are understood; and how its use reflects aspects of our socio-cultural behavior. As an approach to the formal study of the Spanish language, we will explore actual and diverse language data such as texts, speech samples, and songs to grasp complex linguistic phenomena. Conducted in Spanish.
Prerequisite: Spanish 202 or permission of instructor. Limited to 18 students. Fall and spring semesters. Professor Sánchez-Naranjo.