Courses

Crosslistings: ANTH 23501/33501, CDIN 23500/33500, COGS 22008

In this course we will investigate anthropological and linguistic perspectives on language emergence, as well the social, demographic, environmental, linguistic, and modality (vision, speech, touch) factors that contribute to the formation of new languages. Emerging languages in communities around the world offer unprecedented scientific opportunities to address important questions previously deemed intractable, such as: Where does language come from? How do our experiences of the world influence the way our languages are structured? At what level of abstraction can language be studied as an autonomous object of analysis? The topic of language emergence has tended to focus on the interaction of linguistic, psychological, and demographic factors. We will bring the important anthropological dimension to the topic of language emergence, which addresses the way that users of emerging languages inhabit the world. The readings, lectures, and discussions will address new implications for our understanding of language creation.

Prerequisites
One Linguistics course and one Anthropology course are recommended. Consent of instructor required.

Crosslistings: COGS 22010, SIGN 26030

In this course we will examine the language of deception and humor from a variety of perspectives: historical, developmental, neurological, and cross-cultural, and in a variety of contexts: fiction, advertising, politics, courtship, and everyday conversation. We will focus on the (linguistic) knowledge and skills that underlie the use of humor and deception and on what sorts of things they are used to communicate.

What does it mean to say that someone sounds Gay? What does it mean to say that somebody sounds Black? Or to say that someone sounds ‘educated,’ ‘southern,’ ‘woke,’ ‘like the kids these days,’ or ‘not from around here,’ and so on. In answering these questions, we’ll examine the specific linguistic properties that get used (often unconsciously) to encode social signals and the ways that those same properties are perceived (also often unconsciously) to inform our social judgments. At the same time, we'll examine the rhetoric and terminology used in media and everyday conversation to characterize other people's dialects and voices along with all the ways this usually diverges from linguistic reality.

Each week, we'll cover one ‘voice’ (e.g. accent, dialect, social group, etc.) and read about its linguistic characteristics along with the ways those characteristics influence our social judgements. We'll also examine the ways that particular voice is portrayed, discussed, or criticized in popular media. Students will write short essays (500-800 words) each week and grades will be based on those essays as well as participation in class and canvas discussion threads.

This course will explore the cognitive and neural bases underlying language comprehension and production. Class topics will draw on historic and contemporary research invoking a range of neuroimaging techniques to examine how sound, meaning, and structure are processed in the brain. Students will also explore how theories about the computations and representations underlying human language can inform, and be informed by, the biological constraints imposed by the nervous system. Prior knowledge of neuroscience is not required, but familiarity with linguistic and psychological concepts may be beneficial.

Cross-lists LING 25001; NSCI 23125; PSYC 250102

This course is an introduction to the linguistic diversity of Native North American Languages. In addition to a survey on grammars of select Native American languages and language families, students will engage in deeper study of a particular language interesting to them as a part of their coursework. This course provides both grammatical information as well as a brief introduction to the landscape of language revitalization, loss, and change in the modern era, including investigations of language vitality and the interplay between the federal governments and language programs.

This course is an introduction to sociolinguistics, the study of language in its social context. We will look at variation at all levels of language and how this variation constructs and is constructed by identity and culture, including relationships between language and social class, language and gender, and language and ethnicity. We will also discuss language attitudes and ideologies, as well as some of the educational, political, and social repercussions of language variation and standardization.

This course is intended to help students make sense of the current discourse on diversity and inclusion/exclusion from a historical perspective. They will be trained to read critically the evolution of political discourse on citizenship in the United States since the American Revolution. They will learn to detect the role of shifting interpretations of race and ethnicity, after that of European nationality, in determining who is (not) a (full) citizen. For instance, who counted as “American” in the early stages of the Republic? Why were Native Americans and (descendants of) forced immigrants from Africa excluded at the outset? How did English become the unofficial language of American citizenship and inclusion? What factors favored its rise and drove to extinction the competing European national languages?

Cross-lists CHDV 26050/36055; LING 36050; RDIN 26050/36050

Crosslistings: COGS 20001/30001, EDSO 20001/30001, PHIL 26520/36520, PSYC 26520/36520, SIGN 26520

What is the relationship between physical processes in the brain and body and the processes of thought and consciousness that constitute our mental life? Philosophers and others have puzzled over this question for millennia. Many have concluded it to be intractable. In recent decades, the field of cognitive science--encompassing philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and other disciplines--has proposed a new form of answer. The driving idea is that the interaction of the mental and the physical may be understood via a third level of analysis: that of the computational. This course offers a critical introduction to the elements of this approach, and surveys some of the alternative models and theories that fall within it. Readings are drawn from a range of historical and contemporary sources in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. (B) (II)

In this class, we will cover computational techniques for collecting linguistic data. We will also cover various methods for using algorithms to analyze that data and some basic computational theory to understand the complexity and efficiency of our algorithms. We will use the programming language Python and focus on real-world applications to gain experience in gathering, manipulating, and analyzing data from sources such as fieldwork, corpora, or experiments. No previous knowledge of programming is required. This is not recommended for students that already have extensive experience in Python.

Crosslistings: COGS 21501

Crosslistings: PSY 27010

How do humans learn, use, and understand language? Psycholinguistics describes a range of research areas that use experimental (and computational) approaches to address scientific problems pertaining to the psychology of language. This survey course on psycholinguistics provides an overview of the key issues discussed in psycholinguistics. It covers language comprehension, production, and acquisition, as well as topics on how our mental machinery shapes natural language and how language is organized and implemented in the brain.

Crosslistings: GCEGU 21780, SIGN 27180

The Arctic is currently undergoing cultural and political upheavals due to rapid climate change and global politics. In this course, we use an interdisciplinary perspective to examine the lives of Arctic peoples—Inuit, Sámi, Nenets and others—whose lives are being disrupted due to melting sea ice, forest fires, thawing permafrost, and rising temperatures. Climate change affects the food supply: hunting, fishing, and foraging are disrupted by unreliable ice and snow conditions, altered wildlife migration patterns, and changes in plant life; fish and sea mammals are loaded with toxins. Warming in the Arctic has resulted in new access to natural resources which have long been buried under snow and ice, but such access comes at a high cost, bringing in extractive industries and a host of security issues. We examine the causes and nature of these changes and the repercussions for Arctic peoples, with a particular focus on language and cultural change. We place a particular emphasis on adaptation and change in the face of increasing threats from climate change, resource extraction, and globalization, and the consequences for Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities and international relations. To understand the complex interaction between human culture and the Arctic environment, we take a broad approach, considering language, literature, film and music, together with political analyses and discussions of human rights and current environmental science, and look for solutions.

This course introduces students to the use of corpora in linguistics. Students will learn about the history of corpora, the different types of corpora that exist, and issues that arise in corpus building. There will also be an opportunity to critically evaluate studies that have used corpus data and to engage in practical activities. The course will not be limited to corpora involving spoken and written texts from major languages but will discuss issues that arise when developing corpora for minority languages (e.g., sign languages).

With more than a quarter of the languages of humanity, the linguistic diversity of Africa represents a richness in terms of world heritage and linguistic description, but also a challenge for trans-community communication and for the integration of small minorities in larger national communities. Additionally, the persistent use of former colonial languages in most official functions may constitute an impediment, with regard to productive communication between educated elites and ordinary community members and the involvement of the latter in national development. The present course addresses these different issues in a descriptive perspective and through open discussions about potential resolutions in terms of language valorization and language planning.

At the end of the course, the students will be able to classify African languages of wider communication in their respective families and identify key features of the latter; identify and discuss potential issues and / or advantages relating to the use of those languages in connection with endogenous development of African communities.

Cross-list COGS 22015

This course is a mixed level introduction to topics at the intersection of computation and language. We will study computational linguistics from both scientific and engineering angles: the use of computational modeling to address scientific questions in linguistics and cognitive science, as well as the design of computational systems to solve engineering problems in natural language processing (NLP). The course will combine analysis and discussion of these approaches with training in the programming and mathematical foundations necessary to put these methods into practice. Our goal is for all students to leave the course able to engage with and critically evaluate research in cognitive/linguistic modeling and NLP, and to be able to implement intermediate-level computational models for novel computational linguistics research.

This course provides an introduction to linguistic fieldwork with hands-on experience through the study of Sindhi, an under-studied Indo-Aryan language spoken in Pakistan and India. Using methods such as structured elicitations, text collection, and data presentation, we’ll explore its grammar—phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. By working with a consultant, we’ll gather data, apply linguistic theories, and test hypotheses, sharpening our skills while highlighting the importance of language documentation for research and cultural preservation. This course also satisfies the non-Indo-European language requirement for linguistics majors.
 

This course will survey multiple areas of modern research currently being conducted across the subfields of cognitive science. Each week we will discuss a new topic of contemporary cognitive science research and participate in a lecture from a researcher in that field. Students should expect to complete weekly readings of scholarly articles and other primary literature, which we will then further contextualize with the other topics in the course and the broader visions of modern cognitive science research.

Cross-lists:  COGS 39001,LING 29001,LING 39001

Crosslistings: ANTH 29407

Why did Hillary Clinton sound “southern” in her Alabama campaign stop? How did Barack Obama’s codeswitching into African American Language affect his political image? How do the dogwhistles politicians circulate get their meanings? These are just a few examples of the kinds of questions we will discuss. In this course, we will analyze the speech of politicians as well as broader political discourses, according to sociolinguistic theory. We will explore concepts such as dogwhistles, framing theory, speech genres, audience design, and personae, while also considering the intersections of language and nationalism, and language and gender and race. Discussions will build on real-life content particularly from US and Eastern European politics, but also from other parts of the world, depending on your interests and backgrounds. Some of the texts we will read include Alim & Smitherman’s Articulate While Black, and Macintosh & Mendoza-Denton’s Language in the Trump Era.

What happens when people who speak different languages live in the same area? How do languages change as a result of their environment and social structure? How do social situations lead to language change and multilingualism? This course will engage with the literature on contact linguistics and multilingualism providing theoretical backgrounds and foundations for analyzing real-world situations. This course will apply the theoretical understandings to several instances of contact linguistics and a variety of complex social situations via case studies. We will briefly cover topics and process such as: bi/multilingualism, translanguaging, dialect leveling, mixed-Languages, pidgins & creoles, and language shift, all through a lens that addresses the complex situations they exist in with respect to cultural contact and colonialism. This brief overview of each of these processes will give students a basis for understanding and recognizing them in real-world contexts as well as providing them with the tools to ask critical questions about the situations and results.

TBA

Crosslistings: PSYC 30401

This is an advanced introduction to the field of psycholinguistics. We will do an in-depth overview of both the empirical findings and the methodologies used on various topics in language comprehension/production, including areas of speech perception, lexical processing, syntactic parsing, and semantic/pragmatic processing. Models at both the computational and the mechanistic levels will also be examined.

Crosslistings: ANTH 37500

This course is an advanced survey of topics in morphology examining current morphological theory through detailed analysis of a range of phenomena and readings from the primary research literature. The topics covered include blocking, inflectional features, syncretism, allomorphy and suppletion, and morpheme order.

The field methods course is a two-quarter course, taken by graduate students and advanced undergraduates. (Students may elect to take the course more than once.) This course is devoted to the elicitation, transcription, organization, and analysis of linguistic data from a native speaker of a language not commonly studied. Students will also gain practical experience in the use of fieldwork equipment. Language chosen may vary from year to year.
 

Crosslistings: ANTH 47305, CHDV 41920, CHSS 41920, EVOL 41920, PSYC 41920

This course is designed to review critically some of the literature on the phylogenetic emergence of Language, in order to determine which questions have been central to the subject matter, which ones have recurred the most, and to what extent the answers to these are now better informed. The class will also review new questions such as the following: What is the probable time of the emergence of modern lang

The idea that discourse can be modeled as a collaborative game, shaped by the intentions, beliefs, and goals of interlocutors,  has a long tradition in linguistics and philosophy. Systematic quantitative assessments of the central ideas, however, are still in their early stages.  This seminar investigates whether and how we can experimentally  and computationally probe some of the core theoretical constructs in this tradition, including Questions Under Discussion (QUDs), alternatives, and common ground.

We approach these questions through a set of concrete empirical cases: scalar implicatures, conditional perfection, imprecision, and related phenomena. Alongside diagnosing the influence of QUDs on interpretation in each case, we will pay particular attention to developing experimental and computational tools for tracking implicit QUDs in discourse, with the broader aim of better defining and quantifying the notion of discourse relevance.

The course is designed for graduate students interested in the intersection of formal semantics/pragmatics and psycholinguistics. Some background in these areas is helpful but not required.

The idea that discourse can be modeled as a collaborative game, shaped by the intentions, beliefs, and goals of interlocutors, has a long tradition in linguistics and philosophy. Systematic quantitative assessments of the central ideas, however, are still in their early stages. This seminar investigates whether and how we can experimentally and computationally probe some of the core theoretical constructs in this tradition, including Questions Under Discussion (QUDs), alternatives, and common ground.

We approach these questions through a set of concrete empirical cases: scalar implicatures, conditional perfection, imprecision, and related phenomena. Alongside diagnosing the influence of QUDs on interpretation in each case, we will pay particular attention to developing experimental and computational tools for tracking implicit QUDs in discourse, with the broader aim of better defining and quantifying the notion of discourse relevance.

The course is designed for graduate students interested in the intersection of formal semantics/pragmatics and psycholinguistics. Some background in these areas is helpful but not required.

Even yet until: polarity sensitive scalar particles. This graduate seminar in Semantics will examine the semantics of the scalar particles even, yet, and until, and their counterparts across various languages, which are often also the counterparts of words like again, also, more, except, and others .All three of these particles have both a positive and a negative polarity use. What these particles mean, whether and how their positive and negative uses are (not) related to each other, and how they get expressed in different languages, will not have even been agreed on in the literature yet until this class is over. Confounding issues implicated in their analysis include: how do we decide between presupposition, truth conditional content, and  implicature? What is additivity? How do negation and aspectual properties interact with scalar reasoning? How do we decide between lexical ambiguity and scope taking? Even other questions will probably yet arise, though not until the class starts. 

This course is an advanced graduate seminar in theoretical syntax. Through readings from the primary research literature, we will make as much progress as we possibly can on answering the following questions, among others: Is syntax governed by principles of economy? If so, what kind of economy do they enforce: derivational economy, representational economy, some other kind, or more than one of the above—and why? And, insofar as syntax does exhibit economy effects, are any of them attributable to “third-factor” principles or principles of natural law—ones not specific to language?

We will read and discuss in detail approximately one research article per week, and every enrolled student will write a final squib on a syntactic topic of their choice, approved by the instructor (which need not be related to syntactic economy specifically).

Discourse at the Edge: Cross-linguistically, clauses exhibit systematic organisation, with a verbal core that is dominated by higher tense/aspect/mood layer, which is, in turn, dominated by what is traditionally referred to as the C-domain, where information relating the clause in question to the discourse of utterance is encoded/introduced. In this class, I will lead an investigation of the C-domain in particular, focussing on proposals which have sought to illuminate the inner workings of the left periphery, such as the Cartographic enterprise (cf. Rizzi 1997), as well as Wiltschko's (2014) Universal Spine Hypothesis. Some other topics that will also be discussed include Speas and Tenny's (2003) proposal that there are dedicated Speech Act and Sentience Projections which collectively form what they identify as the Sentience Domain, Deal's (2020) related proposal that there are semantically active operators which are syntactically present in the C-domain that can affect the interpretation of elements lower in the clause, as well as how these proposals may interact with other contemporary syntactic proposals such as Anti-Locality (cf. Erlewine 2016).

The course aims to guide students on their research in a structured way and to present professionalization information crucial to success in the field. The course is organized largely around working on the research paper, with the goal of making it a conference-presentable and journal-publishable work. Topics covered include abstracts, publishing, handouts, presentation skills, course design, creating and maintaining a CV, cover letters, webpages, and in general everything that is required for you to successfully compete for jobs in linguistics.