Seminaria licencjackie - studia stacjonarne 2017–2018 :: BA Seminars - full-time programme 2017–2018

This seminar is addressed to students interested in studying the post-1950s American film. Particularly, it will survey the ways in which Hollywood, independent and experimental cinema has drawn on a travelogue format in both natural and urban settings in an attempt to interrogate some major trends in 20th and 21st century U.S. and global culture. It will also develop the vocabulary and tools for critical thinking and film analysis, the latter of which requires a careful examination of a given picture’s narrative and genre, mise-en-scene, camera work, editing, montage and sound. Moreover, participants of the seminar will be acquainted with i) the history of 20th century Hollywood and independent film with the special focus on the American New Wave, Movie Brats and some classic auteurs; ii) aesthetics of the main pure and hybrid film genres and their derivatives like neo-noir film; iii) different concepts and phenomena pertaining to the relationship between a travelogue and American (film) landscape, such as magic lantern picture shows, Gunning’s Cinema of Attractions, Musser’s Cinema of Contemplation, slow cinema movement, the panoramic and mobilized virtual gaze or the rise and development of automobile culture in the post-war America. A series of lectures and screenings will be facilitated by discussions on how selected filmmakers have incorporated and challenged specific narrative and editing conventions of early cinema’s phantom rides and city symphonies as well as contemporary road movies to represent the protagonist’s mechanized and conceptual travels, which involve encounters with American natural, suburban and city landscapes. Likewise, the seminar will cover road movies, modern reincarnations of city symphonies, coming-of-age movies and other genres capturing the spirit of travel and self-discovery.

Prospective BA theses should involve an in-depth cultural and film studies analysis of selected works of American mainstream, independent or avant-garde and experimental cinema featuring various forms of travel imagery. The successful candidates are also welcome to focus on a cinematic material and a methodological approach of their own choice.

Selected references:
Archer, Neil. 2016. The road movie: In search of meaning. New York: Wallflower Press.
Cohan, Stephen, and Ina R. Hark, (eds.). 1997. The road movie book. London: Routledge.
Dixon, Wheeler W. and Gwendolyn A. Foster (eds.). 2002. Experimental cinema: The film reader. London: Routledge.
Dixon, Wheeler W. and Gwendolyn A. Foster. 2008. A short history of film. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press.
Guynn, William (ed.). 2011. The Routledge companion to film history. Abingdon: Routledge.
Harper, Graeme and Jonathan Rayner (eds.). 2010. Cinema and landscape. Bristol: Intellect.
Laderman, D. 2002. Exploring the road movie: Driving visions. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Lefebvre, Martin (ed.). 2006. Landscape and film. London: Routledge.
Lewis, Jon. 2014. Essential cinema: An introduction to film analysis. Boston: Wadsworth.
Lucia, Cynthia, Roy Grundmann, Art Simon (eds.). 2016. American film history: Selected readings, 1960 to the present. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
MacDonald, Scott. 2001. The garden in the machine: A field guide to independent films about place. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (ed.). 1999. The Oxford history of world cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Orgeron, Devin. 2007. Road movies: From Muybridge and Mélies to Lynch and Kiarostami. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ruoff, Jeffrey (ed.). 2006. Virtual voyages: Cinema and travel. Durham: Duke University Press.
Sitney, Paul. 2002. Visionary film: The American avant-garde, 1943-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Theatre can be treated as a space that offers “the potential for a new social and cultural discourse" (Bush-Bailey 2009: 33), allowing for an almost three dimensional reflection of reality, indeed, its embodiment. While watching and reading plays, one may decode the rationale for acceptance and reinforcement of social, political and religious ideologies and frameworks as well as ways and means for criticising and opposing them. This seminar will deal with the dramatic arts of Great Britain, starting from the Restoration and concluding in the first part of the 18^th century. While analysing and capturing the revolutionary changes in theatre and drama itself, we will particularly interrogate: constructions of gender; sexual politics; models and anti-models of behaviour; social and individual identity; precepts of morality; definitions of monstrosity; as well as social stereotypes conveyed through plays (for example those related to ageism). Exploring a selection of plays by male and female playwrights, we will investigate what they reveal about the culture in which they were created. The seminar is to show that by studying the past we can learn more about ourselves today and in the future. Students will be expected to read assigned drama, participate in class discussions, deliver assigned presentations and complete their BA theses within scheduled timeframes.

Bibliography
Bush-Bailey, Gillian. Treading the bawds. Actresses and playwrights on the late-Stuart stage. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.
Canfield, Douglas J. (ed). The Broadview anthology of Restoration & early eighteenth-century drama. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001.
Owen, Susan J. (ed.). A companion Restoration drama. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2008.

As Margaret Atwood once said: “We are all immigrants to this place even if we were born here” (Afterword, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, 1970: 62), it is definitely interesting to explore the vast body of Canadian literature from the immigrant perspective. Therefore, the aim of the seminar is to study the contemporary Canadian literature, with a special emphasis on the notions of diasporic writing, multiculturalism and immigrant voices in literature. During the course students will discuss various works of the most famous Canadian authors who represent different ethnic origins (e.g. Chinese-Canadian, Japanese-Canadian, Jewish-Canadian and Polish-Canadian among others) as well as a selection of theoretical and critical essays (e.g. by Linda Hutcheon, Margaret Atwood, Wayson Choy) that will provide a certain background for our discussions and future BA papers. We will place a range of chosen literary texts in the Canadian historical and cultural contexts. The seminar will introduce students to the process of writing BA papers within the field of literature. We will address a number of issues ranging from the formal aspect of writing theses to methodology of research, gathering materials and developing a critical approach to the views of others.

Candidates wishing to participate in the seminar should have good knowledge of English and American literature and an authentic interest in literature. Prior knowledge of Canadian literature is not obligatory.

Selected Bibliography:
Hammill, Faye. 2007. Canadian literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Kröller, Eva-Marie. 2004. The Cambridge companion to Canadian literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
New, W.H. 2003. A history of Canadian literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Cognitive linguistics is primarily interested in how meaning is constructed in communication. The major assumption is that it is constructed together by all the participants in the communication act. The Speaker/Author chooses elements of the available semiotic systems to provoke the Hearer/Reader to construct their own meaning from the resources available to them (knowledge, personal experience, contextual cues). The second important assumption is that humans make sense of the surrounding world through their bodies moving across the space and through their experience with biological, cultural and social environments. In this BA seminar we will look at how basic analytic tools proposed by cognitive linguistics, such as: image schemata, conceptual metaphor and metonymy, conceptual integration help us understand how meaning is constructed in discourse. The data for analysis may come from various sources of multimodal communication. That is communication, in which meaning results from an interaction of various modalities, e.g. verbal and visual. Internet memes, advertisements, photo-journalism, graphic novels, cartoons are all examples of such data.

Selected bibliography:
Croft, William and D. Alan Cruse. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hampe, Beate. 2005. From Perception to Meaning. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Kövecses, Zoltan. 1993. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Who constitutes a ‘minority’ is often contested, but very often minority status is conferred or adopted through the indexicality of language. This seminar examines alternative approaches to linguistic practices of speakers in a number of minoritized language settings, and will take into account sociolinguistic variables such as gender, ethnic origin and sexuality, to name but a few.  Minority communities are often portrayed through the lens of homogeneity, and while a typical speaker profile may no longer be constructed through Chambers and Trudgill’s (1980/1998) NORM (non-mobile, old, rural men) paradigm, there are still strong traces of this portrayal to be found in the descriptions supplied by many contemporary commentators on these communities.

Minority communities can furthermore be understood in terms of autochthonous linguistic minorities in, for example, the UK and Ireland – namely demographically minoritized speakers of Welsh, Gaelic, and Cornish and Scots in Great Britain and of Irish and Ulster Scots in Northern Ireland, or in terms of under-represented groups in society and in certain domains (migrants, women, LGBT+, etc.). This seminar will explore the ‘minority condition’ from the broadest possible perspective and students will be free to pursue a case study from any identifiable minority, in consultation with the seminar supervisor.  

By applying a number of post-structuralist tools, such as intersectionality (cf. Williams, 1994) and queer theory (cf. Jagose, 1996) to a representative sample of minoritized language communities in the UK and Ireland, this seminar will cover questions which seek to break down the false homogeneity with which these communities are sometimes portrayed and will include topics such as: Are women responsible for language ‘death’? How integrated are so-called ‘new speakers’ within traditional Celtic speech communities? What means of expression do LGBT speakers of minority languages have in their local communities? How are representations of identifiable minorities made in everyday texts and more broadly in literature? These and other questions will be used to guide the students in formulating their own study of a chosen minority within a majority English-speaking context.

References
Chambers, Jack & Peter Trudgill (1980/1998). Dialectology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dorian, Nancy C. (2010). Investigating Variation: The Effects of Social Organization and Social Setting (Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jagose, Anna Maria (1996). Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press.
Williams, Kimberlé Crenshaw (1994). "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color". In: Martha Albertson Fineman & Rixanne Mykitiuk (eds.) The Public Nature of Private Violence. New York: Routledge, 93-118.

Various ‘casual speech’ phenomena, such as schwa absorption, tapping, devoicing, nasal relocation, ð-reduction, and h-dropping routinely occur in normal, conversational English (Shockey 2003). Some of them have received relatively little attention, in part because they do not show up frequently in controlled laboratory experiments, the source of data that empirical phonological research used to be largely limited to. Recently, however, researchers have started to turn to conversational speech as a source of evidence (cf. Durand et al. 2014). Here, instances of the phenomena such as those listed above can be more easily found. They force questions relating to the nature of phonological processes (Lass 1984), and challenge established phonological generalizations (Ernestus et al. 2006) as well as entire models of the organization of linguistic knowledge (Plag et al. 2017). In this BA seminar, you will employ the tools of the burgeoning and exciting field of corpus phonology to investigate a feature of conversational speech of your choice. You will use a large body of data to address a question regarding speakers’ knowlede of their language.

Assessment will be based on submission of homework assignments (often involving computer-assisted data extraction and analysis), a class presentation, active participation and the completion of a BA project (including the production of a thesis).

Selected bibliography
Durand, Jacques, Ulrike Gut, and Gjert Kristoffersen. 2014. The Oxford handbook of corpus phonology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ernestus, Mirjam, Mybeth Lahey, Femke Verhees and R. Harald Baayen. 2006. “Lexical frequency and voice assimilation”. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 120, 1040-1051.
Lass, Roger. 1984. Phonology. An introduction to basic concepts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plag, Ingo; Homann, Julia & Gero Kunter. 2017. Homophony and morphology: The acoustics of word-final S in English. Journal of Linguistics 53, 181-216.
Shockey, Linda. 2003. Sound patterns of spoken English. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

We are ‘sunk’ in the language that reaches us through newspapers, radio, television, the Internet, or magazines. At the same time, we have no doubt that mass-media messages without evaluation do not exist. Every message on the current issues, such as the social and economic World Crisis, which is broadcast or published is shaped according to some values which structure various ideologies. Therefore, the language of mass media is a very interesting subject for linguistic inquiry.
    The general aim of this seminar can be characterised as applying theories and methods proposed within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to the analysis of authentic journalistic texts. As journalists entirely rely on the language use when they construct the image of events, people responsible for given actions and actions themselves, therefore, they use such linguistic features as topoi, lexical selection, metaphors, passive voice, modal verbs and pronouns. The fact that print media are still believed to be the most influential and opinion-shaping is main reasons for choosing the traditional print media and/or their electronic equivalents as the source of the language material for the analysis.

Selected bibliography:
Fairclough, Norman. 2001. “Critical Discourse Analysis as a Method in Social Scientific Research” in Ruth. Wodak and Michael Meyer (eds.). 2001. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, 121-138.
Jaeger, Sigfried. 2001. “Discourse and Knowledge: Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Critical Discourse and Dispositive Analysis” in Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (eds.). 2001. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, 32-61.
Krzyżanowski, Michał. 2009. “The Discursive Construction of ‘Europe’ and ‘Values’ in the Coverage of Polish 1981 ‘State of War’ in European Media” in A. Triandafyllidou, R. Wodak and M. Krzyżanowski (eds.). 2009. The European Public Sphere and the Media: Europe in Crisis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 174-197.
Van Dijk, Teun, A. 1997a. “The study of discourse.” In Teun A. van Dijk (ed.). Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction vol. 1: Discourse as structure and process. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore: Sage Publications, 1-32.
Van Dijk, Teun, A. 1997b. “Discourse as interaction in society. ” In Teun A. van Dijk (ed.). Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction vol. 2: Discourse as social interaction. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore: Sage Publications, 1-37.
Wodak, Ruth. 2002. ‘What CDA is about – a summary of its history, important concepts and its developments.’ In: Ruth Wodak (ed.) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, 1–13.
Wodak, Ruth – Brigitta Busch. 2004. “Approaches to media texts.” In: John D. H. Downing (ed.) The Sage handbook of media studies. Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 105–122.
Wodak, Ruth. 2001. “The Discourse-historical Approach” in R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds.). 2001. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, 63-94.

This BA seminar will examine the literary experience of exile and dislocation in the expatriate writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot and others (the “war generation” or the “lost generation”). Many of these works were either written or set in Paris or Berlin and the seminar will try to recreate the context of these works in the political and cultural domain of post-Versailles Europe. In particular, the seminar will explore the specific impact of the First World War on American prose and poetry. Two writers that will be studied in detail in this connection are William Faulkner in Soldiers’ Pay, his first novel, and Ernest Hemingway in his Nick Adams stories.
     The seminar will also address the question of literary style and narrative structure in this group of post-war writers.  Many of these writers were experimenters in prose fiction: for example, Gertrude Stein attempted to capture a “continuous present” and Fitzgerald wanted to create a poetic version of psychological case history in Tender is the Night. The seminar will also explore the ways in which the American experience of the First World War influenced literary modernism between the wars (for example, in Hemingway’s use of a minimal prose to imitate action, a technique he developed out of his early war fiction, and in Faulkner’s attempt in Soldiers’ Pay to find literary forms appropriate to post-combat trauma).
     The aim of the BA seminar will be to enable participants to come to a knowledgeable and appreciative understanding of a classic group of writers and their post-war literary context.

Course requirements

Short bibliography
Ernest Hemingway, The First Forty Nine Stories
William Faulkner, Soldiers’ Pay
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
J. Gerald Kennedy, Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity
Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

This seminar is devoted to terminology as presented in dictionaries and applied in translation between Polish and English. We will look at terminology as an interdisciplinary science and will explore theoretical approaches connected therewith, e.g. general terminology theory, communicative, sociocognitive and frame-based theories of terminology. We will also analyze links between terminology, lexicography and translation studies. Topics to be covered during the seminar include: terms as specialized knowledge units, term formation, neology, terminological variation and equivalence, basics of lexicography, terminographic definitions, term bases and specialized corpora, term extraction, aspects of terminology management and use of online resources in terminological work. The preferred thematic domains in which students will conduct their B.A. research are law, business and medicine. Possible BA projects might involve:

— analysis of lexicographic representation of selected terms in general and/or specialized dictionaries or in term bases (monolingual or bilingual; paper or electronic/online);

— compilation of a small corpus for mono- or bilingual term extraction and term analysis within the chosen theory;

— critical evaluation of term equivalents in existing E-P-E resources;

— creation of a mini-dictionary within a selected subdomain;

All students interested in lexicology, dictionaries and translation are welcome to apply. Students will be encouraged to choose their own topics for their B.A. projects, however they may also consider suggestions from the supervisor.

In order to successfully complete the course, the students will have to:

— attend classes regularly,

— prepare the assigned materials and readings,

— participate in class discussions,

— pass weekly quizzes and 1 semester test,

— give 1 presentation,

— choose a research topic by mid-December,

— prepare the outline of the thesis (end of January),

— conduct relevant research (February-April),

— complete their B.A. projects by June 2018.

Suggested readings:
Adamska-Sałaciak, A. 2006. Meaning and the bilingual dictionary. The case of English and Polish. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Atkins, S.; Rundell, M. 2008. The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography. Oxford. OUP.
Cabre, T.M. 1999. Terminology: Theory, methods and applications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Faber, P. 2012. A Cognitive linguistics view of terminology and specialized language. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Kockaert, H.J; Steurs, F. (eds.) 2015. Handbook of Terminology. Vol. 1. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lyons, J. 1977. Semantics. Cambridge: CUP.
Mazur, M. 1961. Terminologia techniczna. Warszawa: WNT.
Nielsen, S.1994. The Bilingual LSP Dictionary. Principles and Practice for Legal Language. Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Nowicki, W. 1986. Podstawy terminologii. Wrocław: Ossolineum.
Sager, J.C. 2000. Essays on Definition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Temmerman, R. 2000. Towards New Ways of Terminology Description: The sociocognitive approach. John Benjamins.
Wright, S; Budin G. 2001. Handbook of Terminology Management. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Wüster, E. 1968. The Machine Tool. An interlingual dictionary of basic concepts. London: Technical Press.

Our conceptual system – instrumental in determining the way we think, perceive and act – consists of mental structures emerging from our everyday interactions with the world and from the knowledge we acquire growing up in a given culture. If the way we make sense of our experience is at least partly dependent on our culture, with time it will evolve along with that culture. Since the very same conceptual system that governs our reasoning is involved in communication, linguistic evidence can serve as a “window [in]to the [speaker’s] mind”, revealing something about the way the speaker perceives their reality (Lakoff – Johnson 1980: 205; Lakoff – Johnson [1980] 2003: 3-4). If that be the case, studying historical English should throw some light on how its users experienced and understood the world. The issue this seminar seeks to explore is how the speakers of early English understood abstract concepts such as fear, freedom or courage,  and whether their understanding thereof differed much from ours. The seminar is addressed to those interested in how cognitive and historical linguistics can inform each other.
     In their projects students will analyse linguistic data from before 1950 to determine how an abstract concept of their choice was construed by the users of English at a given stage of its development or cross-periodically. Course requirements include timely submission of homework assignments based on the seminar reading list, active participation in classes and completion of the BA paper.

Suggested reading:
Kytö, Merja. 2011. “Corpora and historical linguistics”. Revista Brasileira Linguistica Aplicada 11/2, available at http://www.scielo.br/​scielo.php?​script=​​sci_arttext&​pid=​S1984-​​63982​​011000​200007 (date of access 11/04/2017).
Kövecses, Zoltan. 2002. Metaphor: A practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kövecses, Zoltan. 2006. Language, mind and culture: A practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lakoff, George – Mark Johnson. [1980] 2003. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Loss, Bettelou – Ans van Kemenade. 2013. “Using historical texts”. In: Podesva, Robert J. – Devyani Sharma (eds.), Research methods in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 216-233.
Rissanen, Matti. 2012. “Corpora and the study of the history of English”. In: Kytö, Merja (ed.), English corpus linguistics: Crossing paths. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 197-220.

Learners’ and teachers’ beliefs are an important source of information about the learning process. If learners expect teachers to use certain teaching procedures, then these expectations cannot be ignored. If teachers believe that certain ways of teaching are effective, then this should be investigated by language teaching / learning researchers.

This BA seminar is addressed to students interested in teaching English as a foreign language and language teaching / learning research methodology and in how teaching can be improved on the basis of information coming from learners and teachers.

In the seminar, we will first discuss the principles of research design and the methodology of  questionnaire and interview studies. This will involve actually putting into practice the procedures we talk about. Then we will review what is known about learners’ and teachers’ beliefs concerning foreign language instruction in selected areas. We will focus on native language use in teaching / learning English and the role of grammar instruction. In the second semester, students will be expected to give presentations based on their own study designs and findings.

(Very) selected bibliography
Butzkamm, W. & Caldwell J.A.W. 2009. The Bilingual Reform: A Paradigm Shift in Foreign Language Teaching. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Brown, J.D. 1988. Understanding Research in Second Language Learning. Cambridge: CUP.
Brown, J.D. 2001. Using Surveys in Language Programs. Cambridge: CUP.
Brown, J.D. and T.S. Rodgers 2002. Doing Second language Research. Oxford: OUP.
Cook, G. 2010. Translation in Language Teaching: An Argument for Reassessment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Creswell, J.W. 2009. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Methods Approaches. Los Angeles: Sage.
Dörnyei, Z. 2003. Questionnaires in Second Language Research. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Dörnyei, Z. 2007. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: OUP.
Scheffler, P. 2013. “Learners' perceptions of grammar-translation as consciousness
raising.” Language Awareness 22/3: 255-269.
Scheffler, P. 2012. “Theories pass. Learners and teachers remain.” Applied Linguistics 33/5: 603-607.

Comparing languages can be fun. It is a bit like analyzing how finite resources of melody, rhythm, harmony and texture can create an infinite variety of music. In language, just the same, finite means appear to create infinite diversity. Part of this diversity is how languages arrange words and phrases in sentences.
     The three major areas of interest of the seminar will be: (i) patterns of word order across languages, (ii) the role of information structure in determining word orders, and (iii) ways of accounting for language diversity, with respect to word order and more generally. We will start from discussing major differences between English and Polish in linearization of phrases and sentences. Next, we will consider these differences in a wider perspective of the typology of languages. This will be followed by introducing the domain of information structure (IS) (functional sentence perspective, elements of pragmatics) and discussing the way in which IS affects syntactic configurations. Then, we will move on to explaining the sources of language diversity and discussing different views on parameters. Some other topics will be a relation between linearization and syntactic structure, sentence cartography, argument structure, and sentence left-periphery. Possible BA thesis topics can include any aspect of English-Polish or cross-linguistic comparative syntax related to word order, parameters, information structure, as well as theoretical underpinnings of the process of linearization.
     Anyone interested in linguistics is invited to join. Despite appearances (another syntax course!) the seminar will be accessible and student friendly and it promises a high rate of final success (i.e. completion of the BA thesis and passing the final exam). The only prerequisite is a prior completion of 2BA English Syntax and Morphology course (i.e. students with ‘warunek’ from this course cannot enroll to this seminar).

Sample bibliography:

Baker, M. 2013. Agreement and Case. In den Dikken, M.(ed.). The Cambridge Handbook of Generative Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Berwick, R.C. & Chomsky, N. 2012. "The Biolinguistic Program: The Current State of its Evolution and Development".
Boeckx, C. 2008. Bare Syntax. Oxford: OUP.
Chomsky, N., 2004. Beyond explanatory adequacy. In A. Belletti, ed. Structures and Beyond. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 3.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 104-131.
Hornstein, N. 2009. A theory of syntax. Minimal operations and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: CUP.
Hornstein, N. Nunes, J. and Grohmann, K.K. 2005. Understanding minimalism. Cambridge: CUP.
Kayne, R. 1994. The antisymmetry of syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Moro, A. 2008. The boundaries of Babel. The brain and the enigma of impossible languages. Cambridge: CUP.
Rizzi, L., 2006. On the form of chains: Criterial positions and ECP effects. In L. L. Cheng & N.Corver, eds. Wh-movement: Moving On. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 97-134.
Shlonsky, Ur  2010. The Cartographic Enterprise in Syntax. Language and Linguistics Compass Volume 4, Issue 6, pp. 417–429.
Song, J.J. 2012. Word order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The seminar course is addressed to those students who are willing to write their BA theses on verbal and non-verbal behaviors of people in everyday life. The theoretical part of the course will be devoted to the dynamic nature of human communication to emphasize that its function is not only to create shared intersubjective meanings but also to establish interpersonal relationships on the basis of dominance or obedience, friendship or hostility, love or hate, cooperation or competition, etc. Accordingly, it will expose the specificity of communicative encounters in dyads and small groups, against the background of public and mass communication, in which communicating individuals, transmit and receive respective messages, on the one hand, and process and interpret their meanings attached to verbal or non-verbal signs, on the other. Realizing that the understanding and interpretation of communicative performances of humans may proceed at cultural, social, and psychic-emotional levels, participants of the seminar will have the possibility to recognize the difference between the interactional and transactional communications, in which individuals act according to the roles which they play in society and/or eventually disclose additional information about the states of their minds. With the aim to apply their acquired knowledge about communication to the analyses of dialogs excerpted from authentic texts in English, the students will search for linguistic manifestations of needs and values and/or beliefs and attitudes of individuals implementing their plans and fulfilling their goals and intentions in interpersonal and intersubjective contacts.
     In the methodological part of the course, special attention will be paid to the explanation of the aims of scientific research and standards of scholarly writing. For the purpose of formulating the topics of their theses and conducting their empirical studies, the students will be familiarized with such terminological distinctions, as the field of academic activity, the scope of the investigative domain, the material object of study and its formal subject matter as a set of relevant properties of the investigated object, the investigative perspective and the aspects of the investigated object, and theory and method as constituents of a scientific discipline. They will be also instructed how to use proper techniques of eliciting and collecting the source material and investigative data as well as to develop appropriate ways of their presentation.

Basic reading:
Barker, Larry L. 1977. Communication. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Berne, Eric /1964/ 1970. Games People Play. The Psychology of Human Relationships. Harmondsworth, EN: Penguin Books.
Berne, Eric 1972/1975. What Do You Say After You Say Hello? The Psychology of Human Destiny. Eleventh printing. Toronto, ON, New York, NY, London, UK: Bantam Books.
Carr, Jacquelyn B. 1979. Communicating and Relating. Menlo Park, California, Reading, Massachusetts, London, Amsterdam, Don Mills, Ontario, Sydney: The Benjamin, Cummings Publishing Company.
DeVito, Joseph. 1976. The Interpersonal Communication Book. New York, NY: Harper and Row.
Harris, Thomas A. 1969. I’m O.K., You’re O.K. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
Luft, Joseph 1963/1969. Group Processes: An Introduction to Group Dynamics. Palo Alto, CA: National Press Books.
McCroskey, James C., Lawrence R. Wheeless 1976. Introduction to Human Communication. Boston, London, Sydney: Allyn and Bacon, Inc.
Ross, Raymond S. 1965/1974. Speech Communication. Fundamentals and Practice. Third edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Tubbs, Stewart L., Sylvia Moss 1974/1977. Human Communication. Second edition, New York, NY: Random House.
Posner, Roland 1988. “What is an academic discipline.” In: Regina Claussen, Roland Daube-Schackat (eds.), Gedankenzeichen. Festschrift für Klaus Oehler zum 60. Geburtstag. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 165–185.
Posner, Roland 2003. “The relationship between individual disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches.” In: Roland Posner, Klaus Robering, Thomas A. Sebeok (eds.). Semiotics. A Handbook of the Sign-Theoretic Foundations of Nature and Culture. Volume 3. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2341–2374.

The aim of this seminar is to explore the nature of communication about health-related issues from (pop)cultural and lay perspectives. Regarding the first viewpoint, of interest may be medical TV dramas, films and books, etc. while the other one may feature popular scientific articles, social campaigns or entries on the Internet blogs and forums. The study of these various data allows one to shed light on how the personas of doctors and patients are portrayed as well as how different phenomena such as disease are constructed not from the perspective of the knowledgeable professional but of the person affected by illness and its experience. In the seminar, the students will first be introduced to the basic terminology used and methods applied in discourse analysis. This method, which makes it possible to tap into the ways in which certain health-related topics are discussed, will be the method adopted in the students’ prospective BA projects. The students will also get familiar with different analytical perspectives that can be chosen. Finally, different types of data from the broadly understood health/sickness context will be demonstrated. In other words, the seminar is meant to acquaint the students not only with the knowledge of various facets of communication about health and sickness but also to equip them with the tools needed to investigate its aspects.
    Course requirements include interest in broadly understood communication about health/sickness. The participants will be encouraged to choose their own topics for their BA projects, however they may also consider suggestions from the supervisor.
    In order to complete the course, the participants will have to: (i) attend classes regularly; (ii) read the assigned material; (iii) participate actively in class activities; (iv) pass 1 semester test; (v) give 1 presentation; (v) choose a research topic, conduct the research and complete their BA projects;

Basic reading:
Fleischman, Susanne. 2001. “Language and medicine”, in: Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton (eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 470-502.
Gotti, Maurizio. 2008. Investigating specialised discourse. Bern: Peter Lang.
Gotti, Maurizio. 2011. “Insights into medical discourse in oral and written contexts”, in: Anna Loiacono, Giovanni Iamartino and Kim S. Grego (eds.), Teaching medical English. Milan: Polimetrica, 29-52.
Gotti, Maurizio and Françoise Salager-Meyer (eds.). 2006. Advances in medical discourse analysis – oral and written contexts. Bern: Peter Lang.
Gwyn, Richard. 2001. Communicating health and illness. London: Sage.
Harvey, Kevin and Neyla Koteyko. 2012. Exploring health communication. Language in action. London: Routledge.
Hyden, Lars-Christer and Elliot G. Mishler. 1999. “Language and medicine”, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 19: 174-192.