In this course you will explore linguistic answers to real questions that you confront when studying Spanish. You will read and discuss articles written by Hispanic linguists about important issues such as language acquisition, translation, dialectical variation, language contact, Spanish in the U.S., and the historical development of Spanish. You will also be introduced to specific levels of linguistic analysis such as phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. In class diverse learning techniques will be employed (lectures, discussions, pair or small group activities, and problem-solving exercises) that will give you opportunities to discuss many important issues from a linguistic point of view.