2020-21

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.

This course introduces cross-linguistic phonological phenomena and methods of analysis through an in-depth examination of fundamental notions that transcend differences between theoretical approaches: contrast, neutralization, natural classes, distinctive features, and basic non-linear phonological processes (e.g., assimilation, harmony, dissimilation).

This is an advanced introduction to the field of psycholinguistics. We will do an in-depth overview of both the empirical findings and the methodologies used on various topics in language comprehension/production, including areas of speech perception, lexical processing, syntactic parsing, and semantic/pragmatic processing. Models at both the computational and the mechanistic levels will also be examined.

The Structure of Chinese course will provide an in-depth examination of the major grammatical properties of Mandarin Chinese, with a focus on morphology, syntax and semantics. Some previous basic knowledge of Mandarin Chinese is desirable but not required. The class material will be based on readings from the primary literature of Chinese linguistics. Students will be expected to develop their own final project about a particular empirical phenomenon in Mandarin Chinese. 

In this course we will study mathematical frameworks of learning and how they have been applied to the learning and learnability of phonological patterns.

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.

In this course, we will study the encoding and decoding of speech from articulatory, acoustic, and cognitive perspectives. At the most basic level, this will involve learning what sounds are used in human languages. You will learn the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a transcription system designed to capture distinctions among various sounds and you will practice using this system to describe sounds that you have never heard before. As we discuss regularities and patterns among the sounds that languages tend to use, we will begin to address the deeper question of why human languages sound the way they do. To do this, we will draw on insights from the physiology of speech articulation, from the acoustic characteristics of speech, and from the nature of humans’ capacity to recognize patterns and perceive subtle distinctions in speech sounds. Building on this foundation, we will then extend the scope of our inquiry beyond individual speech sounds to examine common linguistic patterns involving words, morphemes, accents, etc. within and across languages and dialects.

This course can also be taken by students who are not majoring in Linguistics but are interested in learning something about the uniqueness of human language, spoken or signed. It covers a selection from the following topics: What is the position of spoken language in the usually multimodal forms of communication among humans? In what ways does spoken language differ from signed language? What features make spoken and signed language linguistic? What features distinguish linguistic means of communication from animal communication? How do humans communicate with animals? From an evolutionary point of view, how can we account for the fact that spoken language is the dominant mode of communication in all human communities around the world? Why cannot animals really communicate linguistically? What do the terms language "acquisition" and "transmission" really mean? What factors account for differences between "language acquisition" by children and by adults? Are children really perfect language learners? What factors bring about language evolution, including language speciation and the emergence of new language varieties? How did language evolve in mankind? This is a general education course without any prerequisites. It provides a necessary foundation to those working on language at the graduate and undergraduate levels.

"Alternative facts'' and "fake news'' have fueled growing concerns that we are entering a "post-truth'' society. But what exactly is truth, and why should we care about it? We will address this question over the course of this quarter by examining contemporary views on the role of truth in meaning and communication; challenges to these views from uncertainty and subjectivity; arguments for and against different conceptions of truth; expressions of skepticism about the value of truth; different categories of non-truth (lies vs.\ bullshit); and how all of these issues bear on the relation between truth, belief and decision making. Along the way, we will consider whether our claims to know certain things are always limited because they come from a particular perspective, and what value (if any) truth contributes to the well-lived life.