Courses

Crosslistings: 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. The course is designed to accommodate students both with and without prior programming experience. 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.