General description
The course aims to enable students to understand the basic concepts of general linguistics and its development from structuralism to transformational generative grammar and Chomsky’s role in this transformation. The student reads about aspects of general linguistics, from morphology and grammar in its forms to language acquisition, semantics, phonetics, and historical linguistics. All of this forms the knowledge base for other linguistic materials. Students study the nature of explicit knowledge of the language and implicit knowledge, i.e. being able to use a language on the one hand and knowing its grammar on the other are two different things. In the first case, the speaker uses many grammar rules automatically without awareness of their existence, which can be called unconscious knowledge, while in the second case, linguistics tries to convert unconscious knowledge into explicit knowledge, which is the field of study of linguistics.