This page contains information relating to the Society of Italian Studies Themed conference on the subject of 'Visions of Italy'.

The conference will take place on the 10th and 11th of September 2020 and is organised by the University of Kent.

This module considers French from the perspective of a mother tongue speaker or learner. We will focus on the spoken language, and treat standard French as simply one variety among many. The sound system (or phonology) of French will be explored first, with consideration of recent and ongoing changes in the general system known as français commun or ‘supralocal’ French – the variety that most educated people use most of the time. You will learn how to use IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) symbols for basic transcription of spoken French. We'll then move on to consider the gap between written and spoken French grammar, notably in such areas as the tense/mood system, grammatical gender and agreement, and verb classification. We will look at style and register, and the treatment of neologisms, and particularly the status of franglais in contemporary French, will also be examined. Although the course will provide you with some basic tools of linguistic description, no background in linguistics is required or assumed.