First we will have the naming of the parts, using Suzanne Eggins' Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics to get an overview and terminology for everything from genre and register to transitivity and clause. We will then take an introductory look at three areas of current research and excitement: corpus linguistics (focusing on word/phrase meaning and collocation), cognitive poetics (focusing on genre and figurative language), and "visual language" (how is it like/unlike verbal language?).

Written work will consist of several short pieces applying certain concepts and a final paper critically evaluating one of the concepts we have discussed (more practical than meta-theoretical).