This is an introductory course in linguistics, which combines theoretical insight with practical, problem based activities (PBL). Its aim is to equip students with basic linguistic notions that should enable them to view and understand language as a structured whole, and its relation to human thinking. This is accomplished by providing a background in several core areas of the study of human language i.e. helping students to master the main linguistic notions relative to the origin of language, written vs. spoken language, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, first language acquisition and second language acquisition.

This should, in turn, prepare students for a number of future courses, and enable them to follow all other linguistic subjects and modules that they will encounter during their course of studies (e.g. semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics etc.). Finally, the course is also intended to show students the need to study language(s) from the crosslinguistic perspective.