Linguistics and Multilingual Studies

Bilingualism and Multilingualism; Child Language Acquisition; Chinese Linguistics; Computational Linguistics; Language and Culture; Language and Gender; Language Attitudes and Identity; Language Contact and Language Change; Language Description, Documentation and Typology; Language Maintenance and Language Shift; Language Policy and Language Planning; Morphology; Neurolinguistics; Phonetics and Phonology; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Syntax; World Englishes 
MA Students 

  • Coursework Requirement: 3 Courses or 9 AUS 
  • Submit a Thesis before graduation.
  • Students on scholarship will usually submit their thesis one year before the maximum period of candidature. 
Candidates are required to:

  1. Complete 3 relevant courses approved by their supervisors within the first year of enrolment. 
    (Students may be required to take additional courses subject to the discretion of their MA supervisor and depending on the nature of their proposed MA research) 
  2. Students must complete any remaining coursework by the end of the third semester. 
  3. Submit a dissertation. 40,000 is the maximum word limit for an MA thesis at NTU.

 

PhD Students 

  • Coursework Requirement: 6 Courses or 18 AUs 
  • Submit a Thesis before graduation 
  • Students on scholarship will usually submit their thesis one year before the maximum period of candidature. 

Candidates are required to:

  1. Complete six relevant courses approved by your supervisor
  2. Submit an in-depth literature review of an approved research topic
  3. Pass the Confirmation Exercise
  4. Submission of 75,000 to 85,000 word these and take part in an oral defense

 

​HG7001 Topics in Linguistics Research

Through guided readings, lectures and hands-on tutorial exercises, the student will develop an advanced appreciation of key research topics in linguistics. There are five main components of the course: phonetics & phonology (the study of speech sounds and their contrasts), morphology (the study of form); syntax (the study of structure and arrangement); semantics (the study of meaning); and sociolinguistics (the study of language use in its social and cultural setting).

By the end of this course, graduate students will have an enhanced appreciation of essential topics in linguistics. The advanced knowledge they attain will consolidate their ability to formulate effective research questions and will inform their subsequent MA and PhD research methodology and analysis.​
​HG7002 Advanced Readings in Multilingual Research

This course will offer students the opportunity to read intensively in the area of how bilingualism impacts on the individual as well as the wider community. The approach is interdisciplinary as the readings will be drawn from psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, education as well as cultural studies. The students will be acquainted with advanced theoretical discussion of bilingualism as a phenomenon. This intensive level of engagement will enhance their ability to frame and ask insightful research questions. The readings will also be geared towards an in depth understanding of the methodological concerns in the field. The course will focus on critical topics on bilingual individuals in bilingual communities.

At the end of the course, students will be more analytical about bilingualism as a social phenomenon. They will be more able to evaluate the impact it has on both individuals and the community and they will be more able to ask cutting edge questions relevant to the field. After completing this course, students will be able to pursue their own data collection for their own independent research in a multilingual context.
​​HG7003 Topics in Language Contact

This course offers a multidimensional overview of contact among languages. Language contact is considered at the individual and societal level from both the synchronic perspective and its diachronic consequences. While long term multilingual societies converge in linguistic areas, long term adult acquisition L2 contact can be found at the origins of pidgins, creoles and linguae francae. The course introduces students to current models of language contact, replication of linguistic material and the latest consensus about the dynamics of structural convergence. The structural perspective on language contact is complemented by a sociolinguistic and diachronic perspective. Students will be introduced to social factors known to play an important role in language contact, as well as to long term outcomes of language contact. Finally, the current debates in the field will be considered in detail, enabling students to link their own research to the latest developments in the field.​
HG7004 Advanced Morpho-syntactic Analysis

This course will equip students with advanced skills required for the in-depth structural analysis of unfamilar languages. The selected readings and modes of assessment are both designed to enrich knowledge in areas crucial to the success of linguistic description and analysis and will thus serve to prepare students for the task of independent MA and PhD research. After completing this course, students will have an enhanced understanding of morphosyntactic analysis and first-hand experience of descriptive linguistic research, analysis and description. This will contribute significantly to their preparation to pursue independent research for their MA and PhD topics.​​
HG7005 Advanced Readings in Sociolinguistics

This course covers advanced work in sociolinguistics, including consideration of a range of theoretical models and alternative methodologies for collecting data and analysing sociolinguistic variation. It offers a critical review of sociolinguistic methods for data collection and analysis. Students taking this course will develop their knowledge of the various approaches to the study of sociolinguistics to the point where they are able to conduct their own fieldwork and analysis of spoken language, and are able to deepen their understanding of the relationships between various social aspects and language use.​
HG7006 Sociolinguistics of Endangered Languages

This course is devoted to analyzing the problems of endangered languages, particularly endangered language spoken by minorities, focusing on the sociolinguistic study of the causes, circumstances and results of endangerment, and other structural and socio-political processes related to endangered languages and to their survival. The students will analyse aspects of the loss of minority languages, either indigenous or migrant, in the presence of a dominant second language. They will investigate the relationship of these languages to previous and current policies, emphasising the positive or negative impact of institutional intervention for the survival of endangered minority languages.​​​
HG7007 Language Description and Documentation

In this course, graduate students will learn how to record and analyse the grammar of an unknown language. Working with a native speaker, students will apply their knowledge of structural linguistics to the analysis of the phonetics, phonology, semantics, pragmatics, morphology and syntax of a language to which they have had no prior exposure. They will learn how to work collaboratively with a native speaker and co-researchers to produce a grammatical sketch of the language, annotated texts and a dictionary. Students will also learn how to record and analyse linguistic data using the latest applications in digital technology.​
HG7008 Language Development and Language Behaviour

The course will introduce students to topics on language development and Behaviour from the neuro- and psycho- linguistic perspective. Theories, models and research methods employed in the study of language development and Behaviour will be introduced. These theories will be discussed and evaluated for their contribution to a deeper understanding of these topics. Topics to be covered: language acquisitions, reading development, second language learning, language disorders, speech comprehension. ​​
HG7009 Topics in Historical Linguistics

This course reviews the main topics in historical linguistics. Students will become familiar with the application of the comparative method and with other various methods used in the classification of languages, including lexicostatistical methods and most recent methods in cladistics. In addition to the reconstruction and classification methods, students will became familiar with a number of topics in grammaticalization and language evolution. Students will be guided to relate selected readings from these topics to the current debates in the field.
​​HG7010 Approaches to Sound Structure in Language

This course will build on students' existing knowledge of phonetics and phonology. Beginning with a review of traditional articulatory descriptions of speech, the course will introduce students to major issues in the analysis and description of sound structure, and will provide them with a practical understanding of the essential approaches, frameworks, and methods that are applied in the field currently. Basic topics will include segmental acoustics, perceptual organization, phonological rule ordering, and a survey of tone and intonation systems, while more advanced topic areas will explore the representation of variation, the role of bias in language learning, and the influence of the lexicon.​​
HG7011 The Politics of Language

The course starts with an overview of language policy and planning at all levels from nation-state governments to the individual (including the most widely accepted frameworks), then looks at areas where policy and planning overlap. The course covers areas such as the legal status of languages and language rights; the interrelations between globalisation, nationalism, ethnicity, identity and language policy; linguistic ecology; multilingualism as a problem or resource as well as issues on language minoritisation and endangerment. Students will be assigned a set of readings from several authoritative scholars, including Joshua Fishman, Bernard Spolsky, Stephen May and Ofelia Garcia. Students will also be given guided readings of a selection of key papers and journal articles published in recent years on language planning and policy in Asia, Europe, America and Africa.​
HG7012 Topics in Theoretical Syntax

This course will give a detailed introduction to the history, origins and development of theories of syntax; to demonstrate how these models can be applied to the analysis of various grammatical categories; to make students aware of the strengths and limitations of different models of syntactic theory; and to develop critical thinking and linguistic analysis skills. Students will be guided to relate selected readings from these topics to the current debates in the field.​​​
HG7014 Evolution and Ecology of World Englishes

This course examines the theoretical underpinnings of the study of World Englishes as well as the methods employed in this field of research. Students will be exposed to the different approaches to the study of World Englishes. Students will also be looking at the evolution of World Englishes from both the structural and sociological aspects of linguistic analyses.

At the end of the course, students will be more analytical about World Englishes as a research field. They will be more able to evaluate the impact it has on both individuals and the community and they will be more able to ask cutting edge questions relevant to the field. After completing this course, students will be able to pursue their own data collection for their own independent research in a multilingual context.​
HG7015 Topics in Psycholinguistics 
 
Language is a fundamental aspect of human beings and is central to social life. In this course we will consider a range of topics relevant to the nueral underpinnings of our ability to comprehend and produce human languages. Topics range from the sensory-motor aspects of language use to the nature of abstract linguistic representations, and include consideraton of a number of congenital and acquired linguistic deficits such as different forms of aphasia.

The course is designed to highlight important theoretical issues in language processing and to understand how different techniques in cognitive science (e.g. recodings of electrical and magnetic activity of the brain) have been used to address these issues. The course also aims to provide training for critical reading of research reports and for development of research questions and experiment design.
​​HG7016 Topics in Functional Linguistics

The course will introduce students to a selection of topics within a field of study that has come to be known as 'functional linguistics'. The topics may vary from year to year, but will include a sample of influential functional approaches to the study of language from the following list: cognitive grammar; construction grammar; information structure and sentence form; grammaticalization theory; grammar, discourse and interaction. The theories will be discussed and evaluated for their contribution to a deeper understanding of language forms and functions.​​
HG7017 Computational Lexical Semantics

In this course students will become familiar with how to represent word meanings computationally and a variety of methods for automatically determining the meaning of words. These include dictionary based methods, such as LESK, graph based methods such a UKB, supervised methods such as sequence classification and best paths as well as vector space methods. We will finish with a discussion of how to provide feedback from word sense disambiguation to meaning representation.​
HG7018 Advanced Readings in Interactional Linguistics

This course will begin with a review of some fundamentals and latest developments in Conversation Analysis (CA), with a focus on the interface between CA and Linguistics. Students will be assigned a set of readings from several classical volumes, including Ochs, Schegloff and Thompson's Interaction and Grammar, Couper-Kuhlen and Selting's Studies in Interactional Linguistics, and Couper-Kuhlen and Ford's Sound Patterns in Interaction. Students will also be given guided readings of a selection of key papers and journal articles published in recent years on interactionally sensitive grammatical analyses of data from several languages, including English, German, Japanese and Chinese.​
HG7019 Topics in Intercultural Interaction

The course will introduce students to a selection of topics within a field of study that continues to gain importance in today's globalized world and era of internationalization initiatives. The topics may vary from year to year, but will include issues relevant to preparing students to endeavour on an individual/independent research project in the field of intercultural communication. It will raise critical issues and provide vital awareness-building in topics lying at the heart of communication across cultures. The theories discussed will not only build a deeper level awareness of the complexities of intercultural interaction, but will also foster intercultural skills and effectiveness in the students. ​​
HG7020x Readings in Linguistics Research

Through guided readings and hands-on tutorial exercises, students will read comprehensively in one area of Linguistics not offered as a course in the MA/PhD programme. This course is taken by graduate students under the direction of a faculty member, most likely the supervisor. The course offers a great flexibility in adapting to the individual academic interests of the student to the research interests of the faculty.

By the end of this course, graduate students will have an enhanced appreciation of a topic essential to their dissertation. The advanced knowledge they attain will further consolidate their ability to formulate effective research questions and will inform their subsequent MA and PhD research methodology and analysis.​​
HG7021 Computational Grammars
 
The course gives students the skills to implement a computational grammar of a language. On the one hand, the course will focus on technical aspects, like the installation of the tools needed for the grammar development, how to run the tools, and how to do the actual implementation. On the other hand, the course will focus on certain grammatical phenomena, like modification, agreement, valence, and long-distance dependencies, as well as formal syntactic and semantic representations (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Minimal Recursion Semantics)

The students will develop their own grammars, which can be used for both parsing and generation. Parallel to the development of the grammar, a test suite will be made in order to test the accuracy of the grammar. At the end of the course, it will be demonstrated how the grammars can be used in Machine Translation.​​​
HG7022 Meaning in Context

This course focuses on aspects of meaning that depend upon the context of use and the intentions of speakers when they try to communicate. The course will give students ample opportunity to apply theoretical concepts to the practical analysis of language use encountered in daily life.
​​HG7023 Statistics for Psycholinguistic Research

This course aims to provide graduate students with necessary knowledge in using statistical tools for their own research projects. Commonly used techniques in linguistic/psychological research, such as t-test, ANOVA, multiple regression etc., will be covered. Students will NOT be tested on formulae, instead, the focus is on how to make use of computer software, such as Excel and SPSS, to organise data, present observations and conduct statistical analysis. Students will also gain experience on how to write up empirical findings in a language acceptable by the field, and will at the same time learn how to critically read statistics reported in research articles. Through this problem-based approach students will gain a deeper understanding of statistics. Students who have no prior knowledge in statistics are more than welcome to enrol.​​
HG7024 Advanced Readings in Child Language Acquisition

This course will introduce students to advanced research methodologies commonly used in child language research. Advanced topics in first language acquisition and children's language development from birth right through the school years will be the focus of the course. Readings in multiple areas will be included.
​HG7025 Topics in Neurolinguistics

This course introduces functional neuroimaging at a more advanced level. Specific areas include:

  • Neural representation of written language comprehension​
  • Neural representation of speech perception
  • Neural representation of multiple languages​
HG7026 Introduction to Malay Linguistics

​This course is a comprehensive overview of the most important topics in Malay linguistics. Students will become familiar with the state of research and will be able to identify new research topics as well as acquire a working knowledge of Malay. In addition to structural and diachoronic description, Malay dialectology will be introduced in the larger discourse on language complexity and the impact of language contact. Finally, students will be introduced to the rich tradition of Malay verbal art (both oral and written literature).
​HG7027 Embodied Actions

Graduate students of linguistics necessarily require a profound appreciation of the various factors that govern our use of language in situated environments, including para-linguistic dimensions. This course deals with the advanced methodology used in the general domain of discourse analysis and will broaden graduate study options in LMS, thereby exposing students to new avenues of linguistic inquiry.​​
HG7028 ​Comparative Chinese Dialectology

Given the unique multilingual nature of Singapore, LMS aims to offer courses covering all four official languages and their dialects. The Division already has a specialized course in Malay linguistics and this course is essentially its Chinese counterpart. The course will equip students with expert knowledge in Chinese linguistics and build a solid foundation for their own research work. Broad knowledge of the major topics in Chinese linguistics will enhance the skill set of our students and will serve them well in finding a future job or pursuing further studies on the topic.​

HG7029 Advanced Semantics

The course introduces the study of Semantics according to a diachronic perspective, analyzing significant examples from different language families. It provides an accurate explanation of several epistemological aspects of Semantics, exploring a number of approaches in Historical Semantics and Semantic Analysis. The main focus of the Course is on the change in meaning of names and words from all over the world, involving different language families and historical contexts. Students will work on one 'macro-example' per class. The aim of the course is to make students familiar with advanced notions and hermeneutic 'tools' in Semantics, with the history of this discipline, and with its theoretical criteria and pragmatic applications in Linguistics. The course deals with Semantics according to theoretical principles, with significant links to etymological and historical-phonetics reconstruction, exploring all the possible applications of the discipline to the study of the origins of names and of their meanings.

HG7030 Natural Language Processing for Linguists

Computer-based methods and tools are becoming increasingly more widely used in contemporary research. This course provides an introduction to the key instruments and resources available on the personal computer that can assist the linguist in performing fast, flexible and accurate quantitative analyses. Students will learn a scripting language (Python) and use it and the Natural Language Tool Kit (NLTK) to analyse linguistic phenomena. We will show examples of both symbolic and statistical processing. ​
HG7031 Embodied Actions

This advanced course in analyzing natural talk-in-interaction focuses on how actual situated communication is highly embodied and utilizes multimodal semiotic resources. In particular, how the speaker's action is projected through cooperative bodily gestures is discusses, thereby presenting an integrative approach to the organization of language and the body within situated human interaction.​
HG7032 Topics in Corpus Linguistics

This course aims to provide graduate students with key concepts and common methods used in the construction of language corpora. On completion of this module, graduate students should be able to understand the uses of text corpora in language research and be able to manipulate program to extract data from a corpus. Students should be able to design and build a corpus for specific task.​
HG7033 Analysis of Talk-in-Interaction

This course offers an overview of how talk-in-interaction can be systematically analyzed using the methods of Conversation Analysis. Beginning with a sketch of the history of the field and a consideration of some basic concepts (e.g., turn-taking, sequence organization and recipient design), the course will quickly move into the business of doing (guided) data analyses. Students will learn how to do this kind of analysis through weekly hands-on sessions using naturally occurring data (mostly audio and video recordings of talk-in-interaction).
​HG7034 Laboratory Methods in Phonetics and Phonology

Recent developments in phonetics and phonology have seen a collapse of the traditional division between these two disciplines and the emergence of a new, hybridized approach. So-called laboratory phonology emphasizes the use of measurable phonetic evidence in order to explore the nature of the abstract cognitive representations that underlie speech sounds. The phonetic data may be drawn from virtually any source, including experiments, spontaneous speech corpora, or field data, though crucially the observations are based on instrumental measurement, and claims must be quantitatively testable. This course provides students with significant training in this approach through a series of extended practica involving data collection and analysis. Students will learn how to identify and use phonetic data to argue for specific theories of the cognitive mechanisms that underlie speech sounds. A key theme of the course concerns how gradient variation in speech can be represented and explained. By the end of the course, students should be able to conduct original research involving a phonetic or phonological component that is both convincing and relevant to the contemporary linguistics community.​
HG7036 Linguistic Typology

Linguistic typology aims to define and classify languages according to their distinguishing features, and to establish universals on the basis of attested patterns. In this course, students will compare and assess competing explanations for these patterns by considering the impact of diachronic influences, pragmatics, markedness and cognitive processing constraints on linguistic structure. The main areas of study are: the theory of language typology; sampling methodologies and their justification; linguistic typology as applied to categories of grammar and syntactic structure; text analysis; and processes responsible for the development of grammatical complexity.​
HG7037 Comparative Grammar: Chinese and English

Linguistic typology aims to define and classify languages according to their distinguishing features, and to establish universals on the basis of attested patterns. In this course, students will compare and assess competing explanations for these patterns by considering the impact of diachronic influences, pragmatics, markedness and cognitive processing constraints on linguistic structure. The main areas of study are: the theory of language typology; sampling methodologies and their justification; linguistic typology as applied to categories of grammar and syntactic structure; text analysis; and processes responsible for the development of grammatical complexity.
​HG7038 Origins and Evolution of Language: Biological, Computational, and Culture

This course addresses central questions in the evolution of natural language: where it came from; how and why it evolved; how it came to be culturally transmitted; what makes it a unique means of communication shared across the human species; and how languages diversified. An understanding of language evolution necessarily requires the exploration of its biological, computational, and cultural (BCC) dimensions all at once. To this end, we will explore the latest ideas, theories and empirical methods from diverse fields, including linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, artificial life, biology, cognitive and neuroscience. At the end of this course, students will be able to: a) appreciate interdisciplinary research, by combining evidence and methods from the social and natural sciences; b) assess the strengths and limitations of the various pieces of evidence; and c) devise connections between seemingly dissimilar disciplines and methods.​

HG7039 ​Thinking about Thinking

Three basic ideas have been put forward to explain human cognition: instincts, associations, and inference/reckoning. The course will review and evaluate these ideas in the context of modern accounts of information processing theory, dual mechanism theory, heuristic and biases, and massive modularity. We will look at the explanatory scope, and strengths and shortcomings of each of these accounts. While the accounts are usually put forward as mutually exclusive, we will examine whether they can be reconciled and integrated.

HG7040 ​Forensic Linguistic Analysis

This course introduces the theoretical foundations and basic techniques of data analysis in a legal context, including an overview of various qualitative and quantitative approaches to data analysis, grounded theory foundations, content analysis, case study examples and analyses, how to question decision-making in court cases in a critical manner, and how to argue a legal case convincingly. Students will be expected to complete weekly readings and weekly skill development tasks in and out of the classroom as well as to collect data, and then analyze and present findings based on the techniques covered in the course.​

HG7041 The Anatomy & Physiology of Speaking & Hearing

This course examines the anatomical and physiological details underpinning aspects of speech, both speaking and hearing, including the respiratory system, the laryngeal and supralaryngeal parts of the vocal tract, the auditory system, and the brain, and the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of these structures and systems. In addition to in-class examinations, students will need to demonstrate their technical knowledge through the construction of a physical model of a structure or process of their choosing. Students will also need to produce a written work that critically evaluates and synthesizes recent literature, drawn from a wide array of relevant fields, concerning a structure or process of interest.