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
ASLG 10100
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
This course is an advanced survey of topics in graduate syntax examining current syntactic theory through detailed analysis of a range of phenomena and readings from the primary research literature.
MW, 1:30-2:50
Graduate student standing. Undergraduates with a grade of A or A- in Intro to Syntax may petition the instructor for admission
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.
TR 9:30am-10:50am
