Winter

This course examines how modern Greek cinema and literature have shaped and reflected evolving views of Hellenism in the long twentieth century, exploring how filmmakers and writers have grappled with questions of identity, memory, and historical trauma. We will analyze films such as America America, Never on Sunday, Smyrna, My Beloved, Little England, and1968. Our course will focus on pivotal moments in modern Greek history, including the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922, the Second World War, and the Greek military dictatorship (1967-1974). In addition to film analysis, students will engage with modern Greek literature, exploring texts that offer deeper historical and cultural context, including selected writings by two renowned Nobel laureates, Odysseas Elytis and Giorgos Seferis; Dido Sotiriou's Farewell Anatolia; Ioanna Karystiani's The Jasmine Isle; and Maro Doukas' Fool's Gold. Students will explore themes of displacement, diaspora, collective identity, and shifting perceptions of the past, developing a nuanced, interdisciplinary understanding of modern Greece. No prior knowledge of Greek is required, and all readings will be provided in English translation.

A foundational principle of cognitive science is that the workings of cognitive systems--whether biological, mechanical, or digital--can be productively represented by the operation of formal computational models. This course provides a survey of popular modeling frameworks (such as Bayesian rational agents, connectionist networks, dynamical systems, etc.), as well as the cognitive phenomena that these models have been used to simulate. We will discuss the theoretical commitments of these models, assess strengths and weaknesses of each framework for addressing different types of cognitive questions, and analyze the implications of these models' successes and failures for our understanding of the mind.

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)

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.

The majority of modern linguistic analysis looks at language as a static system, which L1 learners acquire based on the data they are exposed to in early childhood, without access to its history. Learners are unconcerned with why their language is the way it is, or how it got that way; they only need to know its structure and extrapolate which rules will produce the correct outputs. Understanding this linguistic competence is the task that occupies most working linguists. In this course, however, we will explore how language systems get into the state they're in when learners encounter them, with their idiosyncrasies and irregularities. Historical linguistics gives us, among other things, the power to explain synchronic irregularities. In doing so, we will discover patterns of regularity in how grammars change over time across different languages. For instance, the English verb forms was and is have an s where their plural counterparts were and are have an r. To the L1 learner and the synchronic linguist, the question is: "How is this system learnable and what rules will correctly (re)produce it?" But as historical linguists we will inquire further: "How did the distribution of these forms come about in the first place? Does some former regularity underlie it? If so, what rule accounts for it?" We will find that synchronic irregularity tends to emerge from the operation of regular principles, some of which work to obscure rules that had once been part of speakers' grammars.

Writing developed in different ways in different places, and as a result, the world's writing systems have differed dramatically from one another. Yet, despite the apparent dissimilarity of scripts across space and time, they display remarkable similarities both in the underlying principles of their organization and in the stages that they passed through in their evolution. This course explores the story writing from the Near East, China, and Mesoamerica to present-day alphabets and syllabaries. In addition to the evolution and typology of old and modern writing systems, the course also covers the decipherment of long forgotten scripts (Egyptian, Sumerian, Persian, Maya, etc.).

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.

When hearing speech, humans rapidly and robustly map from a continuous acoustic signal to an abstract representation of the sounds of their language. This class will explore models of this acoustic-phonetic perceptual mapping by drawing from a variety of methodologies and perspectives. We will discuss the merits and issues of linguistic, computational, and neuroscientific approaches and draw connections between these disciplines. A background in neuroscience or computational modeling is not required.

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.