LING

Based on Swahili Grammar and Workbook, this course is a continuation of Linguistic Introduction to Swahili I. It addresses complex issues related to grammatical agreement, verb moods, noun and verb derivation, non-typical adjectives and adverbs, double object constructions, subordinate / coordinated clause constructions, and dialectal variation. Additionally, this course provides important listening and expressive reading skills. For advanced students, historical interpretations are offered for exceptional patterns observed in Swahili, in relation with other Bantu languages. This course allows fulfilling the non-Indo-European language requirement.

Spoken by around 18 million in Central and Eastern Africa, Kinyarwanda / Kirundi is one of the most spoken Bantu languages and has the status of an official language in Rwanda and Burundi. Based on a conversation book and a grammar guide, this course integrates speaking practice and linguistic discussion. It will allow the students to understand fundamental structures of Kinyarwanda in various areas. Topics include sound and tonal patterns, noun class agreements, verb moods, and sentence structures. Additionally, this course provides important listening and expressive reading skills. It will allow the students to discover elements of the Rwandan culture and to participate in elementary conversation about everyday life in Kinyarwanda. This is a general introduction course with no specific prerequisites. It allows fulfilling the non-Indo-European language requirement.

This course will examine topics in generative syntax pertaining to purported linguistic universals, with a view towards cross-examining such claims against evidence deriving from contact languages, with a particular focus on Singlish.

This course serves as a graduate-level introduction to the study of sociolinguistic variation. We explore the three waves of linguistic variation and how differences in language-use connect with larger ideological categories such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and locality. This course is designed to explore sociolinguistics from a quantitative variationist approach, while drawing on theory from linguistic anthropology. Graduate students will read peer-reviewed journal articles in the field, design their own research project on a sociolinguistics' topic, as well as acquire practical skills in the field including performing sociolinguistic interviews, transcribing, and analyzing morphosyntactic or sociophonetic variables.

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.

This course is intended for students with a strong background in phonology. We will explore the major themes of phonological theory from 1870 to today, focusing on such questions as the distinction between phonology and morphophonology, the nature of phonological representations, and the character of hard and soft contraints on phonological representations.

Based on Swahili Grammar and Workbook, this course is a continuation of Linguistic Introduction to Swahili I. It addresses complex issues related to grammatical agreement, verb moods, noun and verb derivation, non-typical adjectives and adverbs, double object constructions, subordinate / coordinated clause constructions, and dialectal variation. Additionally, this course provides important listening and expressive reading skills. For advanced students, historical interpretations are offered for exceptional patterns observed in Swahili, in relation with other Bantu languages. This course allows fulfilling the non-Indo-European language requirement.

The Arctic is currently undergoing cultural and political upheavals due to rapid climate change and global politics. In this course, we use an interdisciplinary perspective to examine the lives of Arctic peoples—Inuit, Sámi, Nenets and others—whose lives are being disrupted due to melting sea ice, forest fires, thawing permafrost, and rising temperatures. Climate change affects the food supply: hunting, fishing, and foraging are disrupted by unreliable ice and snow conditions, altered wildlife migration patterns, and changes in plant life; fish and sea mammals are loaded with toxins. Warming in the Arctic has resulted in new access to natural resources which have long been buried under snow and ice, but such access comes at a high cost, bringing in extractive industries and a host of security issues. We examine the causes and nature of these changes and the repercussions for Arctic peoples, with a particular focus on language and cultural change. We place a particular emphasis on adaptation and change in the face of increasing threats from climate change, resource extraction, and globalization, and the consequences for Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities and international relations. To understand the complex interaction between human culture and the Arctic environment, we take a broad approach, considering language, literature, film and music, together with political analyses and discussions of human rights and current environmental science, and look for solutions.

How do humans learn, use, and understand language? Psycholinguistics describes a range of research areas that use experimental (and computational) approaches to address scientific problems pertaining to the psychology of language. This survey course on psycholinguistics provides an overview of the key issues discussed in psycholinguistics. It covers language comprehension, production, and acquisition, as well as topics on how our mental machinery shapes natural language and how language is organized and implemented in the brain.
*NOTE : LING 20001 and/or PSYC 20200 are helpful but not required

This seminar focuses on current research in contact linguistics in a global perspective, including but not limited to the impact of languages of wider communication (e.g. English, Russian) in contact with other languages. Topics to be covered include the following: language/dialect contact, convergence and language shift resulting in attrition and language endangerment and loss. Other contact-induced linguistic changes and processes to be considered include borrowing, code-switching, code-shifting, diglossia, loss of linguistic restrictions and grammatical permeability, and the impact of language contact in the emergence and/or historical development of languages.