Living and loving Linguistics at Birmingham: my highlights

Hi guys! My name is Excellence and I am a first year student studying English Language and Linguistics at UoB. So far I’ve enjoyed my degree a lot: I’ve made loads of friends with similar interests to me and I have the freedom to explore and study aspects of language for myself. Here are a few highlights of my course that I would love to share.

Delving into the main assumptions of areas of linguistics, such as the mentalist, or Chomskyan tradition of linguistics, functionalist linguistics and Saussure’s view of language as ‘langue’ and ‘parole’, has been quite insightful. It has given me the chance to think for myself about what I think language is and why and how to apply findings to the real world.

This has unlocked my hidden interest for the philosophy of language, as well as just linguistic analysis. Having the freedom to explore linguistics has also been a highlight. In the module ‘Investigating Language’, I’ve learned more about the structure of an academic study, how to write one and how to carry out language investigations of my own.

My favourite moment so far has to be when I was debating on whether a hotdog is a sandwich and pondering the line between ‘biscuit’ and ‘cake’ (particularly, pondering where Jaffa Cakes lie on that spectrum).

This discussion occurred while studying different theories of meaning, moving from rigid and componential theories of meaning where words have specific attributes (such as a biscuit being hard and a cake being soft), towards the prototype theory of meaning where there are more typical examples of a certain word, with all examples of that word meaning sharing a resemblance of some sort (such as a Victoria Sponge being a more ‘typical’ example of a cake than a Jaffa Cake).