The two-semester course (LANG7401 and LANG7402) introduces students to five core components in linguistics: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.  It will provide students with a solid grounding in fundamental concepts and methodologies of these five linguistic areas, which will enable them to tackle linguistic problems systematically and help them understand that despite superficial diversity, human languages share fundamental similarities in terms of the universal principles that govern their possible structures.  This aim will be approached and achieved through exploring language data.  Methods of formal analysis will be applied to data drawn from a variety of languages, with a focus on the analysis and comparison of English and Chinese.  Systematic properties generalized from the analysis will be discussed in relation to their application to language teaching and other fields.