Ling: Contemporary English

The course focuses on how English is used today in a variety of situations to meet the communicative goals of its users. While adopting a systemic-functional perspective of language we will look at how English lexico-grammar as an inventory of resources is functionally used for making meaning. The course systemizes your knowledge of English lexico-grammar and invites you to view it as a key to understanding how language users experience the world and how they construct it through language. To demonstrate the functioning of English, real-life illustrative data are used from ´native´ as well as in ´non-native´ environments of the increasingly globalized contemporary world. The overall goal of the course is to equip you with an analytical tool which is very useful for understanding and critical evaluation of the uses of language in today´s complex social world, and thus for making you an empowered language user.