The course aims to teach the fundamentals of general linguistics: knowledge and understanding of the functioning of a language on a synchronic level with particular attention to the various levels of analysis: phonetic and phonological, morphological, lexical and semantic, pragmatic, syntactic. Students will also be taught the fundamentals of language change and the main explanatory models for change.

At the end of the course, students are expected to have learned the fundamental concepts of general linguistics and to be able to identify the levels of analysis and their various basic structural elements. Furthermore, they should be able to place linguistic phenomena in time and in geographical, social and situational space.