Winter

In this course we will examine the language of deception and humor from a variety of perspectives: historical, developmental, neurological, and cross-cultural, and in a variety of contexts: fiction, advertising, politics, courtship, and everyday 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.

MW 1:30 – 2:50 pm

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.

TTH 3:30 – 4:50 pm

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.

TTH 9:30 – 10:50 am

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.

TTH 11:00 am – 12:20 pm

Language processing requires listeners to pay attention to multiple cues simultaneously. This seminar examines how cue integration is accomplished at different levels of linguistic analysis, with a comparison between speech perception and sentence comprehension. In addition to general models of cue integration, we will also look at how cue weighting and integration vary across individuals, and  what mechanisms underpin such variability.

The Advanced Experimental Methods class provides comprehensive training on specific experimental paradigms/methods in language science research. In the current quarter we will focus on the EEG methods. Students will develop practical skills by carrying out a project, learning about the experimental design, data collection and data analysis procedures. In addition to the methodology training, we will also read and discuss how EEG is applied to address theoretical and empirical questions in the domain of language and cognition. Prior to this class, students should have taken the graduate level Experimental Methods class or the equivalent.

In this seminar course we will review the "creole exceptionalism" tradition against the uniformitarian view, according to which creoles have emerged and evolved like other, natural and non-creole languages. We will situate creoles in the context of the plantation settlement colonies that produced them and compare their emergence specifically with that of languages such as English and the Romance languages in Europe. We will also compare these evolutions with those of new colonial varieties of European languages (such as Amish English, mainstream American English varieties, Brazilian Portuguese, and Québécois French) which emerged around the same time but are not considered creoles. Using the comparative approach (in evolutionary theory), we will assess whether the criteria used in the genetic classification of languages have been applied uniformly to creole and non-creole languages. In return, we will explore ways in which genetic creolistics can inform and improve genetic linguistics (including historical dialectology).

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.

Seminar on topics related to syntax; topic TBD.