History and English Language BA(Hons)

This module introduces you to the structure of language as a system. You will learn all the basics of linguistic description, using mostly, but not only, the English language to illustrate. The module focuses on the fundamental linguistic concept of ‘levels’ of language, starting from the smallest (sounds) and building up to sentence structure. Emphasis is on the development of practical skills in analysing language structure.

For this module, you'll either complete a work placement plus associated documentation, or undertake a work-related exercise, producing a tangible end-product and an evaluation of the process of its production. You'll also give a presentation based on the research you've done around career planning.

This module equips you with the necessary tools to devise and plan your own independent research project. The module is taught through a series of workshops that support you in becoming a historical researcher in your own right. You'll identify a historical research topic, locate research questions within an appropriate historiographical context and find relevant primary source material. As such, the course offers a significant underpinning for Year 3 dissertations and projects.

This module explores the Crusades to the Holy Land from the late 11th to mid-13th Centuries in the context of contemporary political, social and religious developments in Western Europe and the Middle East. You'll be directed to different accounts of the Crusades in contemporary sources from the perspective of the crusaders themselves, as well as from the point of view of the Jewish, Islamic and Byzantine peoples who were affected by the influx of Western Europeans to the Eastern Mediterranean. You'll also have the opportunity to examine crusading activities within Europe (e.g. Spain and the Baltic).

On this module, you'll use archival resources to explore the social, cultural, legal and emotional history of refugees in the twentieth century. You'll think about how we can hear the refugee ‘voice’ in history and how this can help us reflect on the experience of displacement, in the contemporary world as well as in the past.

Through a study of primary and secondary sources, this module introduces you to the political and religious history of the Tudor and Early Stuart periods in areas under the control of the English Crown. You'll find out that many issues from this time have been debated by historians, and come to understand how they resonate into the 21st Century.

This module deals with the theory and practice of oral history in relation to the history of childhood and youth. You'll conduct at least one interview, and provide all the relevant ethical and archival documentation to accompany it. You'll be introduced to the key problems in oral history of memory, ethics, intersubjectivity and narrative. Finally, in order to write about the experience of childhood and youth in the past, you'll learn the analytical techniques which can be applied to oral history data.

On this module you'll get to grips with the history, memory and historiographical controversy surrounding the Nazi era in European History. You'll use a broad range of primary and secondary source material to develop a deep historical analysis, rooted in the debates over the consent or coercion of the German population, the limits of the totalitarian model and the nature of victimhood and commemoration.

You’ll be exploring histories of the African continent on this module, and thinking analytically about sources in order to break free from dominant colonial ideas, structures and questions. Following broadly chronological lines, you’ll consider the impacts of geography, religions, slavery, medicine and healthcare, among other key themes.

This module focuses on informal conversation. Fundamental features of this variety will be explored, including the turn-taking system, turn construction units, storytelling, overlap, repair and preference. Discussion will include consideration of approaches to the study of language, and the relationship between language and society as a result of studying conversation analytic findings.

This module focuses on the linguistic analysis of style in language. It aims to improve your skills in text analysis through the introduction of a range of cutting-edge theories, frameworks and methods for literary and non-literary stylistic analysis. You'll have the opportunity to explore the relationship between form and function in language by analysing a wide range of texts and investigating such issues as text style, genre style and authorial style.

Corpus linguistics focuses on the techniques of computational corpus-based language study. The module concentrates on the analysis of electronic linguistic corpora using corpus linguistics software packages such as AntConc and WMatrix. Corpus linguistics methodologies are used to illuminate such areas of linguistics as grammar, lexicography and stylistics. Additionally, you'll have the chance to examine how to build, store and exploit your own corpora for linguistic analysis.

After considering the scope of pragmatics (language use) and its place in the study of language and communication, this module covers its major conceptual foundations (speech act theory, deixis, presupposition, implicature, relevance theory, context) and then proceeds to introduce its major developments and applications (the pragmatic perspective on conversational structure; interpersonal pragmatics, intercultural pragmatics; discursive pragmatics; metapragmatics.)

This module develops your skills in the phonetic and phonological approach to language analysis. It will build upon your knowledge from Sound to Speech, while introducing new levels of phonetic and phonological analysis. This module will cover the basics of acoustic analysis of speech, commonly used phonological notation, and the position of phonology within linguistics. You will be introduced to a new piece of software to conduct acoustic analysis of speech and also be provided the tools to analyse and describe sound alternations in different languages.

The aim of this module is to develop the tools of syntactic analysis and description that you began to acquire in 'Structure to Sense'. You'll be introduced to a more formal syntactic framework, specifically Minimalist Generative Syntax, which will be contrasted with other generative and non-generative approaches. You'll be introduced to the theoretical motivations behind Minimalism and apply the theoretical apparatus to solve syntactic problems. This will provide a more nuanced understanding of the grammatical features of language, how languages differ and how grammatical relationships are realised.

You'll be asked to produce an extended piece of work supervised individually by a member of staff. There will be a regular schedule of supervisions and you'll be asked to submit evidence of your progress (outlines, drafts, etc.) at regular intervals. The skills workshops will focus on raising your awareness of research practices, and developing your organisational and self-management skills.

The Honours Project is a 6,000-word tightly focused project based on primary sources. You can choose this instead of the longer dissertation, and pick up another module to make up the credits. The Project is on a topic of your choice. You’ll also produce and present a research poster outlining your progress.

This module will investigate East Central Europe in the period between the two World Wars. Carving states out of the remnants of the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian Empires created much political (and, in some cases, military) turmoil over border disputes and ethnic exclaves, some of which resurfaced after the end of the Cold War. You will learn about Eastern European history in the 1920s and 1930s, theory and methods of spatial history and historical geography, maps as sources, and digital cartography for analysis and dissemination of historical geographies.

This module aims to develop your understanding of the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries in relation to the ‘care’ of what we would now call mentally ill and learning disabled people. By focusing on social and political, as well as medical themes, you’ll have the chance to explore both the understanding of mental ill health and learning disability, and the responses to them.

This module examines the impact of economic conditions in the era of the Great Depression on British politics, culture and society. You’ll be looking at government economic policy, the social impact of economic changes on education and other social issues, examining the consequences of unemployment, the problems of poverty and health, and the protest movements of the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, and the General Strike. You’ll also explore the fortunes of the Conservative, Liberal and Labour parties during the inter-war years and assess the activities of smaller parties such as the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

The reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) is at the heart of this module. By examining a range of primary sources from the era, as well as important secondary studies, you’ll gain real understanding of key themes in the early-modern era, such as gender, politics, foreign policy and religion. You’ll also consider how Elizabeth has been portrayed in the modern era, in images, television and film.

This module will explore aspects of medieval history in depth, focusing on contemporary narrative sources, both historical and literary, and including some consideration of related visual and material sources. You'll also engage with the post-medieval representation of the Middle Ages in both academic and popular terms.

This module examines the history and memory of the French experience of World War II, focusing on the German Occupation, the Vichy Regime, French collaboration, and the development of internal and external resistance. You'll have access to a broad range of primary and secondary source material (in translation) to provide a cultural historical analysis, rooted in the debates over silence, truth and representation.We’ll watch a number of historical feature films together and use them to analyse how public or popular memory develops.

The module immerses you in the aftermath of the First World War and attempts at peacebuilding and reconstruction. You’ll investigate the work of new organisations like the League of Nations, the experiences of individuals and cultural responses. There’s a focus on Britain, but set in the context of international movements and global challenges.

This module develops your understanding of the Great War: its origins, the military course of the conflict, its impact on British society, and reactions to the war in literature, art and memorial architecture. While we’ll mainly study the British experience of the First World War, we’ll also broaden our approach and consider continental European and imperial experiences too.

This module allows you to explore current issues and practices in a number of aspects of audiovisual translation (AVT), including subtitling, audio description and dubbing for TV and film drama. The module aims to develop your understanding of the effects of decisions made in the process of audiovisual translation, and to use linguistic insights to improve professional practice in this area. You'll have the opportunity to explore both the theoretical and practical aspects of audiovisual translation and gain knowledge of the industry.

You'll have the opportunity to explore issues relating to language and power and how to apply the techniques of critical linguistics to example texts ranging from casual conversation to political speechmaking. Techniques you’ll have the chance to study include the analysis of naming, transitivity, modality, speech and thought representation, presupposition, opposition, negation and deixis. You'll also be encouraged to read and discuss extracts of the seminal work in this field.

This module provides an introduction into the way in which children acquire language. Along with overviewing some general issues such as the acquisition of vocabulary and grammar, the module explores the procedure of acquiring social skills through language learning. This ‘socialisation’ process spans expression of one’s emotions via language, through the proper use of conventional language, to distinguishing between the norm of language use in group and individual settings. The module aims to train you to collect and critically analyse language data produced by children.

This module is about how people get on – or don’t get on – with each other. It explores why people say the things they say and do the things they do, the effects of these actions on their feelings and sense of self, and how they evaluate what people say and do as polite or rude, friendly or unfriendly, acceptable or unacceptable.

This module provides an introduction to forensics as it is applied to both speech (Forensic Phonetics) and text (Forensic Linguistics). On this module you will learn about the roles speech and text play as evidence in the courtroom as well as for criminal investigations. You will be introduced to a range of topics from both forensic phonetics and forensic linguistics that will enable you to situate the use of language in the real world and to analyse speech and written language from a forensic perspective. The topics introduced through this module will be supported by lectures and hands-on lab work.