Linguistics Mainstream in UNS’ English Department

By Alifa Irlinda (ED’09)

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is one of the four mainstreams conducted by Sebelas Maret University’s English Department. Every year, it draws many English Department students interested in the study to deepen their Linguistics knowledge within classes.

Linguistic Levels

Linguistics can be divided into several sub-studies, i.e. language structure, language meaning, and language in context. The first category deals with the grammar of a language, meaning some sort of rules obeyed by the users of a language concluded in the study of morphology, syntax, phonology and systemic functional grammar. The second scoop of study deals with language meaning. It is concluded in the study of semantics and pragmatics. The third sub-study sees language as it is influenced by social, political, cultural, and historical matters. It is concluded in the study of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and discourse analysis.

All the sub-studies of linguistics mentioned above are interestingly delivered in the classes by the teachers. To mention that, I am personally interested in the study of pragmatics, the study of how meaning is inferred from the context. Pragmatics is concerned with how language assigns meaning. It includes the attempts to manage and resolve ambiguity. Learning pragmatics and semantics makes one able to use ambiguity as a strategy to blur their motives as well as reveal what an ambiguity means.

Systemic functional grammar class is also great. In my experience, SFG made me curious and gave me a migraine at the same time. It’s because the data were very intricate to analyze, yet intriguing. For the students who take SFG class, I suppose you have the same problems like I did. To overcome that, my friends and I often discussed the whole analysis together since all the assignments and tests were taken home, although we often ended up with different analysis and conclusions. However, discussing it together helped so much in understanding the data.

Language acquisition class is even more interesting. We studied how people acquire language as children, including exceptional children who live in disabilities such as deaf, dumb, or both. We learned how amazingly they process their mother tongue in their mind and even other languages later when they grow up.

Talking about discourse analysis class, it requires more critical thinking. Otherwise, you will only be statically stuck while analyzing such a short text. Discourse analysis includes the study that sees language in its role within social, political, cultural matters, etc. Therefore, a broad knowledge about such areas is also needed in order to produce a good and scientific analysis. In my opinion, this class is the toughest among all, yet challenging and interesting to study.

I often heard many students choose Linguistics mainstream because it needs a rather shorter period of time to graduate and doesn’t require much reading. Well, let me get this straight. None of the mainstreams in ED conducts a learning-teaching process without requiring the participants of the class to read. Finally, to achieve the short period of time to graduate, it basically depends on the individual’s effort and consistency.