Winter

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.

Variation is a ubiquitous feature of speech, yet much of the variation observed is non-random. This class will examine this type of structured heterogeneity (Weinreich et al., 1968) from the point of view of sociophonetics. We will focus on the interrelationships between phonetic/phonological form and social factors such as speaking style and the background of the speaker, with a particular interest in explaining the origins and transmission of linguistic change. Our goals will be to (a) acquire the phonetic and phonological foundation necessary to conduct sociophonetic research through practical exercises; (b) survey new sociolinguistic research that addresses issues in phonetic and phonological theories and (c) locate and explain phonetic variation in its social context while drawing on current approaches to the relationship between language and society. This course will give students hands-on experience with sociophonetic research. As part of the empirical foundation of this course, we will focus on sociophonetic variation across the Chicago population. For the final project, students are required to conduct a small-scale study investigating a research question of relevance to sociophonetic research using the corpus collected during this quarter.

Humor and deception both make significant use of language and yet they can also both occur independent of language. Furthermore, they both rely heavily on expectations and conventions regarding communication and language but they do so in somewhat different ways – humor often works by tweaking or confounding our expectations and conventions while deception often works by exploiting them. In this course we will examine deception and humor from a variety of perspectives: historical, developmental, neurological, and cross-cultural and in a variety of contexts: fiction, advertising, pol- itics, courtship, and normal 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.

This is the second in a two-course sequence designed to provide a foundation in the scientific study of all aspects of linguistic meaning. The second quarter focuses on the syntax-semantics interface and cross-linguistic semantics. The class will introduce in detail a theory of the way in which the meaning of complex linguistic expressions is formed compositionally from the meaning of constituent parts, and the interaction of semantic and syntactic composition. This theory will form the basis for exploring some empirical questions about the systematicity of cross-linguistic variation in the encoding of meaning.

Language is generally associated with the abstract realm of thought, representation and expression, a realm that contrasts sharply with the material realm in which we tend to place violence. Language is furthermore often seen as antithetical to violence: violence is outburst that comes when the rational order of language fails. In fact, however, questions of language, and especially of speech, surface in every aspect of thinking about violence. Speech is a medium within which violence is performed, and is part of the modern machinery of war. It is also a medium through which systems of oppression and subordination are articulated and registered by groups and individuals, socially and psychically. Violence relies on speech for its justification, rationalization, and sustenance. At the same time, the rawness of violence challenges our fundamental faith in the representational and expressive capacities of language, in both destructive and creative ways. This intensive reading seminar explores the relation between speech and violence through scholarly and literary texts from a variety of humanistic fields and traditions.

This is the second in a two-course sequence providing an introduction to topics at the intersection of computation and language, oriented toward linguists and cognitive scientists. In this quarter we will cover more advanced topics in cognitive/linguistic modeling and natural language processing (NLP), applying more complex programming and mathematical foundations. Our goal in this quarter is for students to leave the course able to implement advanced models and conduct novel research in cognitive/linguistic modeling and NLP.

Course Description TBD

This course is an introduction to basic goals and methods of current syntactic theory through a detailed analysis of a range of phenomena, with emphasis on argumentation and empirical justification. Major topics include phrase structure and constituency, selection and subcategorization, argument structure, case, voice, expletives, and raising and control structures.

This course will focus on the Deaf community that uses American Sign Language (ASL) as a lens into the disciplines of linguistics, psychology, and cultural studies, and how the use of ASL contributes to individual identity and identity within society. In addition to these disciplinary foci, topics of Deaf literature and art forms will figure in the discussion and readings, which come from a variety of sources and include seminal works in the field from historical and contemporary perspectives.

Swahili is the most popular language of Sub-Saharan Africa, spoken in most countries of Eastern and Central Africa by more than 50 million people.  Swahili is characterized by the typical complex Bantu structure.  However, it is particularly easy to pronounce and fast learned.

The Elementary Swahili series is designed to help students acquire communicative competence in Swahili and a basic understanding of its structures. The course presents basic phonological, grammatical, and syntactic patterns of Kiswahili. Through a variety of exercises, students develop communicative functionality in listening, speaking, reading and writing.  Emphasis is put on dialogues and role-plays, individual and group presentations, and the use of audiovisual and web-based resources.  Swahili culture and African culture in general are an important component of the course.

At the end of the elementary course series, the students are able to communicate efficiently in everyday life situations, write and present short descriptive notes about elementary pieces of verbal creation (documentaries and video series in Swahili)