Unfortunately this was, as it was run in 2023, one of the worst subjects I've taken in my degree. It was supposed to be a wrap-up to the major, but was a complete mess with the lecturer seemingly reading the slides for the first time as he was presenting them. The assignments were terribly communicated with the tutors and lecturer giving conflicting information on the expectations and requirements. Almost no effort was made to make the subject interesting or appealing to linguistics students, and at least one of the tutors admitted to another student that they had given them bad marks because they were "in a bad mood", and that the student should also have left their name off their assignment because the tutor "can be biased". Extremely unprofessional and pathetic. The second assignment is a group one involving one student recording, transcribing, and translating a short text in a language other than English, another student conducting a literature review on a grammatical topic in the language, and the third student analysing the transcript of the recording to write a short essay on the grammatical topic chosen. As you might imagine, this was a complete disaster. Not only is group coordination already difficult, the fact that the subject was so boring and lifeless no doubt contributed to the death of everybody's last remaining bit of enthusiasm about the assignment. The only redeeming factors about this subject were that (a) the readings were stimulating and interesting, and the weekly reading questions meant you learnt about a diverse range of topics, and (b) the final essay topics are really varied, such that there is a suitable topic for all interests in linguistics. And, even if you don't like any of the 13 suggested essay questions, you can come up with your own at the discretion of your tutor. I chose one of the stock topics, and still had a great time writing my essay.

I really enjoyed this subject, and think it was an excellent way to finish the Linguistics major. The subject is broken up into five sections - Fundamentals (weeks 1-2), which looks at what language is and why linguistic diversity is important; Diversity in Grammar (weeks 3-6), which looks at how different languages facilitate certain grammatical needs; Diversity in Discourse (weeks 7-8), which looks at how languages navigate communicative needs; Linguistic Evolution (weeks 9-11), which looks at language change; and a final wrap-up in week 12 that looks at the origins of language and human vs animal communication. The scope of the subject is therefore quite broad, with different sections that will appeal to different people. While I understand this may be frustrating to some people, because you never really go in-depth into particular topics, I actually found it useful because it exposed me to areas of linguistics I'm not normally interested in. For me, the most interesting part of this subject was looking at diversity in grammar and discourse. The focus in this section was looking at particular communicative needs (for example, communicating epistemic source), and looking at the ways different languages address this need. This was often super interesting because of some of the mind-boggling ways languages worked to address these issues. The course therefore really exposes you to diversity in languages and interesting research questions in linguistics more generally, which I think is a great way to finish the major and inspire further study. My main criticisms of this subject would be that it spent far too long on language evolution and some more philosophical questions on what language is anyway. These sections of the course felt much less tightly focused and were less engaging, in my opinion. There were three main assessments for this subject. The first was a readings write-up which was quite easy, you just had to do one of the readings for weeks 1-10 and answer a question on it in 100-150 words. The final assessment was a pretty standard 2000 word linguistics essay on a topic of your choice. The second assessment was new this semester and a bit rocky as a result. It was a group project based around language documentation, where one person has to document an unknown language using ELAN, then the other two pick a grammatical topic in that language, with one person doing a literature review on that topic in the world's languages and the other analysing it specifically for the group's documented language. I did the documentation part in my group, which was a great way to learn how to use ELAN and some techniques for language documentation more generally. Unfortunately the instruction for this assignment was pretty vague and it wasn't very clear what we had to do. I'm sure this will improve in subsequent versions of the subject, however, given this was the first year they trialed this assessment. Overall, I found this to be a great capstone subject for Linguistics, with some really interesting sections interspersed with some that were less interesting. I would recommend it.

For a capstone subject, this didn't feel like a good 'final' unit for the linguistics major. Each topic felt very rushed and wasn't covered in enough detail. I would've liked to cover less topics, but go through each one in more detail to actually gain an in-depth understanding of things. It felt like a very rushed summary of the entire linguistics major and I didn't feel like I actually learned anything new. The marking was also very harsh and de-motivating because there wasn't any feedback given to reflect the loss of marks. For the final assignment, we could pick pretty much any topic that interested us, which I felt was a nice way to finish off the subject. But overall, I didn't enjoy this subject and it just felt like a very broad recap of the last couple of years, but with really harsh marking for no apparent reason.

Decent. Bit too much of a focus on grammar and felt that despite the name of the subject, the areas covered weren’t all that diverse. Felt myself often bored by the lectures.