General Language Science and History of Linguistics

Published: Thursday, 06 August 2015 09:45

The discipline is read for first-year students of a master course (1st semester). The total working intensiveness amounts to 108 academic hours including class work (lectures) - 36 hours, self-instruction work – 36 hours.  ECTS equals 3. While mastering the given discipline students are to take an exam.

The main goal of the discipline is to improve the level of students’ professional qualification acquired at the previous stage of learning; provide students with skills necessary to carry out self-sufficient scientific research; improve skills of critical perception and evaluation of information sources; promote skills necessary to logically form, explain and defend their own scientific point of view on a given problem and creating or finding means of solving it.

While mastering this course students are to learn essential terms of the course and be able to achieve traits that make for competent scientific study of human language and its relationships to cognition, society, and history. The discipline is concerned with such matters as providing systematic descriptions of languages, investigating the properties of language structures as communicative systems, exploring the possibility that there are universals of language structure, and accounting for the historical development of linguistic systems.

Further goals are to promote the students’ perception of the place and role of the given course in their professional training, especially in forming essential skills of their profession; to form the students’ view of the basic stages of the foundation and development of science.

The most important issues students are to cover while studying the given discipline are: General Questions of History of Science, the History and Development of  Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences, Types of Scientific Research and Development and their Specifics, Structure and Basic Forms of Scientific Knowledge, General Questions of Methodology; Method, the Classification of Methods of Scientific Research; Nature, Structure and Stages of Carrying out Scientific Research; History and Methodology of Liguistics, Specifics of Linguistics as a Science, Specific Features of Linguistic Research.