Spoken Language and Gesture

COURSE OBJECTIVE
In this course, you will learn how to discuss current research on language and communication in a critical and constructive fashion; learn how to analyze the linguistic properties of spoken discourse and the ways in which speakers’ gestures relate to them; and in the process, you will improve your skills in written and oral presentation in English.

COURSE CONTENT
The course concerns several themes, which areinterrelated with each other. One has to do with how we structure our
talk and our co-verbal behavior as units on different levels of complexity. Another is how we use both speech and gesture to express not
only our ideas about the physical world and abstract concepts (both describing and depicting them), but also our stances towards these
ideas. This bring us to the point that face-to-face interaction with speech and gesture can involve alignment and adaptation in real time of
our ideas, our attitudes towards those ideas (our “positions”, in different senses of that word), and our ways of expressing them.

TEACHING METHODS
 Lectures combined with presentations by students and occasional data analysis sessions (3 meetings x 2 hours each per week).

TYPE OF ASSESSMENT
Presentations (30%), essays (55%), and attendance and class participation (15%). The final grade will be a total of all
the parts. All components must be graded at least 5,5. Anyone failing the course may resit only the portion(s) failed.