Winter

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). This course allows fulfilling the non-Indo-European language requirement.

TR 11:00 am – 12:20 pm

This course continues to increase grammatical structure, receptive and expressive skills, conversational skills, basic linguistic convergence, and knowledge of idioms. Field trip required.

MWF 12:30 – 1:20 pm

American Sign Language is the language of the deaf in the United States and much of Canada. It is a full-fledged autonomous language, unrelated to English or other spoken languages. This introductory course teaches the student basic vocabulary and grammatical structure, as well as aspects of deaf culture.

MWF 10:30 – 11:20 am, 11:30 – 12:20 pm

MW 3:30 - 4:20

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)

TR 9:30 -10:50

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.

W 3:00pm-4:20pm

It is an old idea in semantics and philosophy that discourse context can be modeled as a collaborative game between interlocutors, constrained by the intentions, beliefs and goals of the interlocutors. The general principles of how people coordinate in discourse context also have implications for other lines of inquiries, such as how word meaning changes diachronically, or how we interact with each other in the social world around us. The specific cognitive underpinning of people’s ability to collaborate and to draw inferences, however, is far from clear. In this class, we hope to gain some understanding of how (or whether) we can experimentally assess and computationally model some of the fundamental theoretical constructs, such as Question Under Discussion, alternatives, common ground. We will do so by examining a few specific empirical cases, including scalar implicatures, presuppositions, and semantic adaptation between interlocutors. This class is primarily a discussion class, but depending on students’ specific background and interests, we may conduct some hands-on exercises of experimental work.

M 1:30 - 4:20 

TR 12:30 - 1:50

The second half of the sequence takes up basic concepts in sociolinguistics and their critique.

MW 1:30 - 4:20

All languages have morphosyntactic means for restricting what speech acts users are able to perform with a sentence. For example, an interrogative like did you sit down? can be used to ask a question while the imperative sit down! cannot. This seminar addresses some of the question of the “form-force mapping” and the factors affecting it. The main focus will be on the proper division of labor between compositionally determined content, conventionally determined context change effects, and pragmatic reasoning. We will aim to cover the three main ‘clause types’ declarative, imperative and interrogative, as well as the apparently unremitting problem of explicit performatives. 

TR 12:30 - 1:50