#thecrashcourse

Semantics: Crash Course Linguistics #5 

If you want to know what a word means, all you have to do is look it up in the dictionary, right? Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that. This episode of Crash Course Linguistics is all about semantics, or the area of linguistics concerned with meaning. We’ll learn about different types of semantic relationships, and how different languages define these relationships, as well as different approaches to semantics. And we’ll discover that the humble definition may be more complicated than we think.

Sociolinguistics: Crash Course Linguistics #7

Language is an important part of our identities, and the ways we feel about how others use language is influenced by society. The study of the social element of language, and how it forms part of our identity is sociolinguistics. In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll learn about linguistic differences between and within languages based on factors such as location, education, class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, and how our perceptions of these differences affect our society.

Pragmatics: Crash Course Linguistics #6

We don’t always say exactly what we mean, and yet we’re still pretty good at understanding each other. That’s because we don’t just use meaning to figure out what’s going on, we also use context. This episode of Crash Course Linguistics is all about pragmatics, the area of linguistics that deals with context. We’ll cover the four main assumptions we make about context in language, also known as Grice’s Maxims, as well as the ways that languages can use grammar to convey politeness, and the different types of conversational styles within and between languages.

Syntax 2 - Trees: Crash Course Linguistics #4

There are many theories of syntax and different ways to represent grammatical structures, but one of the simplest is tree structure diagrams! In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll use tree structure diagrams to keep track of words and groups of words within sentences, and we’ll break down what roles different types of words and phrases play within a sentence.

Morphosyntax - Crash Course Linguistics #3

Grammar sometimes gets a bad reputation, but we're actually doing grammar all the time! And we're pretty good at it! In this episode of @thecrashcourse Crash Course Linguistics, we'll begin our discussion of syntax by learning how we can take words and morphemes and turn them into sentences, questions, stories, and even videos like this! 

I’m very excited to announce that there's going to be a Crash Course​ Linguistics mini-course coming out at some point in 2020!