Winter

This course deals with the issue of variation and change in language. Topics include types, rates, and explanations of change; the differentiation of dialects and languages over time; determination and classification of historical relationships among languages, and reconstruction of ancestral stages; parallels with cultural and genetic evolutionary theory; and implications for the description and explanation of language in general.

Language is a powerful tool for communication proceedig through various channels including private and public forms of communication such as mass and social media, political, literary, and scientific discourses. It is generally accepted that the way speakers chose to describe something reveals their stance toward truth as well as their rhetorical intention about the message. This affective (Giannakidou and Mari 2021) use follows from the communicative function of language: successful communication requires maximum efficiency, and as speakers choose their words, audiences recognize the intentions behind them and form veridicality judgments (i.e., judgments about the truth or not of the content conveyed, its reliability, and the like). Veridicality judgments are based on knowledge, beliefs, experiences, and ideology (i.e., a set of fixed and non-negotiable beliefs). Non-negotiable beliefs can distort the veridicality judgment and potentially damage, intentionally or unintentionally, the relation to truth. The class includes some classical readings from Plato’s Cratylus, Gorgias and Aristotle’s Rhetoric, as well as more contemporary readings (Giannakidou and Mari 2021, A linguistic framework for knowledge, belief and veridicality judgment, and the phenomenon of concept creep (Haslam2016) where meaning is extended in warranted or unwarranted ways to manipulate emotion.  This course will be taught in Paris, France.

Economy:

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).

This course deals with a variety of topics specific to Linguistic Pedagogy.

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.

This course is a continuation of Syntax I. The emphasis will be on A'-movement and ellipsis operations within the framework of Principles and Parameters and the Minimalist Program. Although we will examine different types of movement and ellipsis constructions, as well as their interactions, the objective will be to understand to what extent we can develop a general theory of syntax. The course will have a strong cross-linguistic aspect to it, examining data from Irish, Austronesian languages, Mayan languages, Wolof, Russian, Romance, Germanic, and others. The topics will include wh-movement in questions, relative clauses, and other constructions, islands and other constraints on movement, sentence fragments (sluicing, split questions), VP-ellipsis, and gapping.

This is the first in a two-course sequence designed to provide a foundation in the scientific study of all aspects of linguistic meaning. The first quarter focuses primarily on pragmatics: those aspects of meaning that arise from the way that speakers put language to use, rather than through the formal properties of the linguistic system itself, which is the domain of semantics. However, a central goal of the course will be to begin to develop an understanding of the relation between pragmatics and semantics, by exploring empirical phenomena in which contextual and conventional aspects of meaning interact in complex but regular and well-defined ways, and by learning analytical techniques that allow us to tease these two aspects of linguistics meaning apart.

Why is the plural of child in English children and not *childs? Why is undoable ambiguous ((i) 'unable to be done', (ii) 'able to be undone'), while unkillable isn't (only 'unable to be killed')? Unhappier is intuitively composed of several, smaller pieces: un-, happy, and -er; but what about unkempt? These questions are the purview of MORPHOLOGY, the field of linguistics devoted to studying the internal structure of words and how they are formed. Consequently, in this course we will investigate the nature of morphemes, in all their cross-linguistic shapes and guises. Key concepts which will frame our discussion include inflection, syncretism, allomorphy, and blocking. The only prerequisite for this course is LING 20001: Introduction to Linguistics.

This course offers a brief survey of how linguists analyze the structure and the use of language. Looking at the structure of language means understanding what phonemes, words, and sentences are, and how each language establishes principles for the combinations of these things and for their use; looking at the use of language means understanding the ways in which individuals and groups use language to declare their social identities and the ways in which languages can change over time. The overarching theme is understanding what varieties of language structure and use are found across the world's languages and cultures, and what limitations on this variety exist.