Gain a deeper understanding of how English grammar works, how it has been studied and how it varies across different contexts as you study the parts of speech that make up the English language and the problems faced in defining them.

You will examine the grammatical structure of English at the levels of the noun phrase, of the verb group and of the sentence, paying attention to issues such as transitivity, adverbials and subordination. Exploring prescriptive and pedagogical approaches to English grammar, you will learn how it varies in dialects around the world, in spoken versus written language, and across different genres.

Introducing you to modern methods of studying the grammar of the English language, this module will allow you to do your own investigation on real examples of English grammatical structures.

Explore literary criticism as it is now and what it may yet become. You will have the opportunity to consider a whole range of major theoretical and philosophical concepts, such as:

• The body
• Race
• Gender
• Violence
• Ecology
• God
• Time
• Death
• War
• Self
• The animal

You will study a range of fascinating modern thinkers, ranging from Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, through to more recent figures such as Simone Weil, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Fred Moten, Cornel West and Sara Ahmed.

Explore how language is used to interact with others, form social groups and shape society. In this module, you will examine how communication functions socially, from the persuasive language used by politicians and advertisers to the way social organisation is reflected in and reinforced through casual conversations among friends.

You’ll draw on different models in linguistics to explore the way language is used and organised to achieve social goals. This includes:

• Using principles of systemic functional grammar to identify who is represented in texts and how,
• Conversation analysis to uncover the structure and management of conversation
• Methods of visual analysis to consider non-linguistic meanings

By the end of this module, you will become more confident in analysing texts and understanding their functions. You will see everyday texts, such as a phone call with a family member or a letter from your GP, in different light because you will understand the features and structures of language that help to organise society.

Reflect on what it means to do criticism in a post-theoretical age. This module asks what happens to literary interpretation after all its many theoretical upheavals – from Marxism and feminism to postcolonialism and queer theory. Is it time to get back to the close reading of literature? Is there still room for pleasure, appreciation and creativity in the practice of criticism? We might question whether literature, in the traditional sense, even exists anymore.

You will pose these questions in relation to a range of traditional and non-traditional texts.

Learning requires language. That makes pedagogic practice language work, and the design of talk and text a crucial dimension of a professional educator's practice.

You will explore talk between teachers and students to better understand what makes for effective classrooms. You will analyse genres that students read and write, and how teachers unpack densely organised information to provide students access and control. You will consider how digital technologies, multilingualism and the growing influence of visual communication can inform teaching. You will work with authentic classroom data while examining what current research says about language and teaching.

By the end of this module, you will have newfound insights into the complex ways in which talk, text and image shape processes of meaning-making in educational settings. Although our primary focus is on the classroom, the insights we provide are equally valuable in any setting where people gather to learn and collaborate.

Soon, you will find yourself in a professional job in a company, school, charity, medical centre, local government or other place of employment. Although very different, such organisations are all held together by language – the language of meetings, client or investor interactions, team leadership and/or crisis management.

You will explore linguistic concepts such as (im)politeness, narrative, and metaphor and consider their implications for multilingual communication and using English as a lingua franca. You will develop your knowledge of how professional communication is organised and how language is used to both reflect and influence wider discourses. The module distinguishes between professional communication and business/workplace language and includes attention to difficult professional communication such as delivering bad news and responding to bullying.

By the end of the module, you will be able to read and assess studies of professional communication, drawing on a range of linguistic approaches and using frameworks to analyse real-life data.

Explore a wide range of literature and drama from the medieval and early modern periods. The module situates medieval and early modern literature in its relevant historical and cultural contexts.

You will develop skills in the close reading of medieval and early modern texts.

Authors studied may include Chaucer, the Gawain poet, Margery Kempe, Mary Wroth, Sir Philip Sidney and Christopher Marlowe.

Exploring the adaption of literature to film and other media, this module focuses on the adaptation of literary texts to such forms as theatre, graphic novel, film, television, song, and game.

You will be invited to reflect on adaptation as a powerful and complex cultural process, one that interprets literature as well as adapts it.

Throughout the module you will normally complete either a critical essay on adaptation OR a creative project (plus short essay) that enables you to produce your own work of adaptation. This may take many forms -- written, (audio) visual, musical, digital, or three-dimensional and/or take the form of a game, production or performance, etc.

Explore postcolonial literature across a wide historical span. Your study will move from the explosion of new national literatures in the era of decolonisation through to contemporary writing that interrogates the legacies of racism and imperialism in our globalised world.

You’ll read exciting major writers who defined the emergence of African, South Asian and Caribbean literature in English in the middle of the twentieth century. You’ll also encounter today’s new voices, grappling with the afterlives of empire.

Cutting through all our thinking will be the question of how literature serves, in Ngugi wa Thiongo’s phrase, as a means of 'decolonising the mind'.

Why does English sound the way it does? How does English vary across different accents? And how do listeners perceive that variation? This module will explore these questions, applying the methods of articulatory and acoustic phonetics to the study of spoken English.

The module will begin with the anatomy of the vocal tract, examining how its muscles work together to produce distinctive patterns of movement. This will provide a system for describing variation in speech. You will then focus on the acoustic characteristics of speech and on the computer-based and experimental analysis of real speech data. You will apply this knowledge to chart sound change in English, describe new varieties of spoken English and explore the perception of different English accents.

By the end of the module, you will have developed skills in technical analysis relevant for speech therapy and voice-assisted technologies, whilst acquiring the foundations for advanced studies in phonetics.

How many advertisements have you already seen today? From moving billboards to advertisements between games on your phone - advertising is everywhere.

How many advertisements have you already seen today? From moving billboards to advertisements between games on your phone, advertising is everywhere.

In this module, you will learn how advertisers use language, visuals, sound and music to influence behaviour. You will discover how to differentiate advertising from marketing by examining hard and soft selling, influencer advertising and the role of “prosumers” on social media. You will explore consumer research to ask what makes a good advertisement. Rich examples show how advertising has borrowed from prose, poems and plays.

You will explore aspects of language including:

• Phonetics (sounds in a language)
• Stylistics (linguistic analysis of literary texts)
• Pragmatics (meaning in context)

By the end of this module, you will be able to analyse the creative use of language in advertisements, understanding the role that advertising plays in wider marketing efforts and reflecting on its uses in your future professional and personal lives.

What we call ‘American Literature’ and how we define America and ‘the American experience’ depends on who is writing and to whom. In this module you will encounter many different voices, many conflicting and contrasting views, a diversity of complex experience and a great range of writing in form and style.

You will explore such questions as: What role do different literary forms play in narrating the self? How does American writing seek to establish a new way of looking at the world? And how and why does literature help shape forms of protest and new critiques of modernity?

The years of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) saw great social, political and cultural transformation. Changing social conditions, extraordinary scientific breakthroughs and the emergence of new technologies all altered the ways in which Victorians thought about themselves and their environment. The literature of the period responded resourcefully to the turbulent circumstances from which it emerged.

In this module, you will examine a wide range of Victorian writing, including novels, short fiction, poetry, drama and non-fictional prose and will explore and interrogate all the complexities of the Victorian age.

In your third year you will study at one of our international partner universities. This will help you to expand your global outlook and professional network, as well as developing your cultural and personal skills. It is also an opportunity to gain a different perspective on your subject through studying it in another country.

You will choose specialist modules relating to your degree and potentially modules from other subjects offered by the host university that are specific to that university and country.

The availability of places at overseas partners varies each year. In previous years destinations for students in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences have included Australia, USA, Canada, Europe and Asia.

How is language connected to who we are, how we see ourselves, and how others see us? This module explores the idea of identity and how it relates to language.

You’ll investigate how accents and other language varieties are perceived in society and how they can reflect or reinforce social identities and inequalities. You’ll also explore areas such as language and gender and learn how identity shows up in the way we speak and write.

You will also look at how people choose to use language in different contexts, in multilingual England and beyond, and the reasons behind this, as well as why people choose to learn new languages. Throughout the module, you’ll think about how these issues are shaped by and help shape power and inequality.

By the end of the module, you’ll have gained useful skills in critical thinking as well as a deeper understanding of how language works in the real world.

Explore present-day English to discover how it varies and how it has evolved, within and beyond its heartland. This module will deepen your insight into the English language by examining the (socio)linguistic dimensions along which it varies and the (extra)linguistic processes that have changed it over time.

From Old English to the present and from British dialects to emerging World Englishes, you will explore how variation in English is driven by factors such as gender and class and how it has been shaped by contact with other languages. You will discover how cultural shifts have changed the way English is used and consider whether we can make predictions about its future.

You will be introduced to key research in variationist and historical linguistics. The module will also encourage you to apply these insights to new data and to undertake data collection yourself.

What is the contemporary? When did the present cultural moment start and how might it end. How do writers respond to the challenge, excitement, pressure and novelty of the ‘now’? And how is imaginative writing faring in the digital age?

You will consider these questions in relation to the work of such major authors as Ali Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Colson Whitehead

Study key texts and contexts from a short but remarkably intense period of literary history. Encompassing the work of writers such as Wordsworth, Blake, Keats and Shelley, you will explore the role of nature, the imagination and the sublime. You will also consider the emergence of the Gothic tradition and examine the interactions between literary and politics in a turbulent era of revolution and change.

Examining a wide range of texts and authors from early periods to the age of the climate crisis, this module will explore the many and various ways in which the non-human world is celebrated, championed and exploited by the literary imagination.

You will explore questions such as:

• What do we mean by the ‘the environment’?
• What experiences, meanings and values do we take from, or discover in our surroundings?
• How have writers characterised the environment and in what ways might the literary imagination be significant for contemporary environmental concerns?

What is critical theory? Why is it one of the most controversial areas of contemporary culture today? And to what extent do theoretical ideas about power, race, gender and identity change the way we think about the world?

On this module you will explore a range of classic and contemporary themes, trends and topics in critical theory from the 1960s to the present. You’ll take a deep dive into key thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze and Agamben and key concepts like biopolitics, globalisation and animal studies.

What happens when radically different forms of art meet? How do these fused forms change our understanding of the world? We will draw on material from different periods and continents, to explore works of art where, for example, film meets history, poetry meets philosophy, fine art meets sociology, religion meets fiction, and theatre meets politics.

Now one of the most important paradigms in contemporary linguistics, this module introduces you to principles of Cognitive Linguistics and the alternative view of language it presents compared to other approaches.

You will explore the cognitive structures and processes that underpin language, including radial categories, frames, image schemas and mappings. You will learn how these things relate to aspects of language like word meaning, grammatical structure and metaphor. You will also explore the idea that much more of language than just idioms is stored in the mind in whole chunks.

Cognitive Linguistics is largely theoretical. However, you will learn how it has recently integrated methods from psycholinguistics and gesture studies as well as how it is applied to social contexts like politics, health and more.

Our media environment is constantly changing and has never been more diverse. The way different media approach events or issues - i.e. the language they use to describe and discuss them - varies enormously. Consequently, there are important theoretical and methodological challenges involved in making sense of this environment.

In this module, you’ll examine social and broadcast media in their changing forms to consider how each contributes to our current media ecology. You will apply frameworks including discursive news values, corpus linguistics, framing analysis and multimodal discourse analysis which are useful in future media careers and as a citizen.

Throughout, you will explore media talk, ideology in news selection and presentation, fake news and mis/disinformation.

The final-year Dissertation is your opportunity to devise, research and explore a topic of your own choice through a programme of directed independent study. You will be helped to begin your thinking at the end of your second year and then, through your final year, you will develop your research, thinking and writing, as you build toward a substantial, self-directed project.

Almost anything is possible; for example, you could choose to explore famous literary names or themes, or research obscure figures and unusual topics. You might draw on the University Library’s special collections, or venture way beyond Lancaster to develop your research. Perhaps you will be inspired by the medievalism of historic Lancaster or the Romanticism of nearby Lake District or be drawn to the far textual shores of the digital world.

You can focus your work towards a professional career or build towards postgraduate study at master’s level. Finally, you can opt to write in classic literary critical styles or push the boundaries of literary study in new and startling ways.

Study the work of four giants of nineteenth-century British fiction: Jane Austen, Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë.

Focusing on questions of class, gender, power, environment and artistic technique, you will explore the tensions between Austen and the Brontes (south vs north, Regency vs Victorian, realism vs Gothic) and trace the imaginative continuities between them.

Both the Gothic and science fiction emerged in response to the 18th century ‘age of reason’ and the Western world’s investment in logic and progress. The Gothic explores the terrors of the past and its return while science fiction imagines alternative futures; in doing so, both voice the concerns of the present.

You will study both classic literary texts and contemporary film and other media. Exploring what the Gothic and science fiction each do, rather than what they each are, you will consider how these genres address some of the most pressing questions facing contemporary Western culture.

Ben Jonson claimed of Shakespeare ‘he was not of an age but for all time.’ This module, however, examines Shakespearean drama and poetry in its own time and as a platform in which early modern debates about agency and government, family and national identity, were put into play. The stage was and is a place in which questions of gender, class and race, gain immediacy through the bodies and voices of actors.

By examining texts from across Shakespeare’s career, you will explore their power to shape thoughts and feelings in both their own age and in ours. You will consider how, in the past and in the present, Shakespeare’s texts exploit the emotional and political possibilities of poetry and drama.

The assessment of this module normally concludes with either an essay OR a creative engagement (e.g. reading, performance, artwork) plus critical reflection.

The early 20th century explosion of literary experimentation known as Modernism was a movement informed by the catastrophe of the First World War, the convulsion that was the Russian Revolution and a host of dramatic developments in art, music, cinema, philosophy, theology, politics and science.

Alongside reading the literature of the time you will also consider various related artistic movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism and Vorticism. Authors covered typically include T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and W. B. Yeats.

Would you like to learn more about a specific topic in Linguistics or English language? Would you like to research and work independently on a study that matters to you? The final-year dissertation module provides this opportunity.

With support from a supervisor, you’ll build on what you’ve learned in previous modules and carry out your own research project. You’ll gain valuable skills in designing a study, asking research questions, and collecting and analysing data.

This module is especially useful if you’re thinking about postgraduate study or a career in research. It’s also a great opportunity to focus on topics relevant to future careers, such as language teaching or speech and language therapy. You'll also develop your ability to work independently and grow as a writer and learner.

Have you ever wondered what the world looks like in other languages? Or what connects language, cognition, culture and ecology? These are the fundamental questions addressed in this module, which explores the latest developments in language-related cognitive science.

You’ll explore what all human languages have in common, as well as how they can differ, and how language, thought, culture, and the environment are linked. You’ll also look at how we communicate using sign and gesture and think about how language forms connect to meaning.

As you continue through the module, you will consider how things like space, time, colour and numbers are talked and thought about in different cultures. With a strong focus on anthropology, you’ll explore the language and culture of several Indigenous communities, such as those living in Papua New Guinea. To help unlock the evolution of language, you’ll also explore culture and communication in non-human populations including chimpanzees and ancestral homo species.

The module emphasises experimental methods. You will work in groups to design, implement and present the results of a language experiment. Together, you will gain an enriched understanding of the linguistic and cognitive diversity of humankind.

On this module, you will study the psychology of language. You’ll explore how the brain helps us learn languages and how language experience can shape the brain itself.

You will examine what happens when specific brain regions are damaged and how this affects things like semantic vs. syntactic knowledge, memory and inhibition. Throughout the module, you will investigate links between language processing and cognitive and social-cognitive skills while discussing specific topics such as autism, aphasia, Williams Syndrome and bilingualism.

You will learn about neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic methods, including eye-tracking, EEG, and neuroimaging, and discuss appropriate measurement of cognitive and linguistic skills. You will also investigate how empirical data can inform practice in speech and language therapy or diagnosing and supporting children with developmental disorders.

Language is much more than linguistic structure. Language is the means through which we pursue social goals and the primary means through which we infer the goals of others. This module will explore how our language use impacts our social and institutional identities, our interpersonal relationships and our impact on the perceptions of others.

You will examine how conventions and norms across contexts and cultures drive the way we interact with others and how deviations from expected behaviour can be perceived negatively. Pragmatics is at the core of Cognitive Science and one of the most exciting disciplines driving the technological and social cognition advances of the 21st century.

As you go through the module, you will develop the theoretical and methodological tools to analyse verbal behaviour in politics, intercultural communication, law, AI and more. You will investigate how communicative behaviour changes alongside neuro-cognitive factors; for example, in first language acquisition, across the autistic spectrum or in dementia.

You will learn how our linguistic behaviours mirror evolutionary patterns in our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. Human interaction is a fundamental tool for ‘social’ survival and how language use can improve our social gains.