Exploring the French Language

The layman's approach to language contrasted with the linguist's; the principal branch of linguistics; varieties of French - the standard language; language and society; languague and register; the lexicon - words and dictionaries; where do French words come from?; word formation; French slang; borrowing from English; word meaning; pragmatics; the sound system - introductions to IPA; the vowel system; the consonant system; connected speech; prosodic features; from phonetics to phonology; morphology and syntax - what is grammar?; derivational morphology and inflectional morphology; the morphology of spoken French; grammatical categories; syntactic structure; discourse - stucture of written texts; conversational analysis; conclusion - the implications of the above for second language acquisition.