2024-25

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.

This course examines how modern Greek cinema and literature have shaped and reflected evolving views of Hellenism in the long twentieth century, exploring how filmmakers and writers have grappled with questions of identity, memory, and historical trauma. We will analyze films such as America America, Elia Kazan’s masterful cinematic epic, which vividly portrays the struggles of a young Anatolian Greek immigrant seeking a new life in America; Never on Sunday, an emblematic film starring the iconic Melina Mercouri, which playfully challenges some scholarly, idealized perceptions of Greece by starkly juxtaposing the grandeur of its timeless, classical heritage with the vibrancy of modern Greek culture; Smyrna, My Beloved, a poignant historical drama that follows a prominent Greek family as they experience the destruction of the flourishing, cosmopolitan city of Smyrna in 1922; Little England, a captivating period romantic drama set in the Greek island of Andros, which is directed by Pantelis Voulgaris, one of Greece’s most celebrated and influential filmmakers; and 1968, a fascinating docufiction by Tasos Boulmetis that intertwines sports and politics in a turbulent historical period. Our course will focus on pivotal moments in modern Greek history, including the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922, the Second World War, and the Greek military dictatorship (1967–1974).

In addition to film analysis, students will engage with modern Greek literature, exploring texts that offer deeper historical and cultural context, including selected writings by two renowned Nobel laureates, Odysseas Elytis and Giorgos Seferis; Dido Sotiriou’s Farewell Anatolia; Ioanna Karystiani’s The Jasmine Isle; and Maro Doukas’ Fool’s Gold.

Through film screenings, literary analysis, and visual materials such as powerfully evocative photographs (Frédéric Boissonnas, Nelly’s), students will explore themes of displacement, diaspora, collective identity, and shifting perceptions of the past, gaining a rich, interdisciplinary understanding of modern Greece. No prior knowledge of Greek is required, and all readings will be provided in English translation.

This graduate seminar is intended for students with a background in phonetics and (historical) phonology and an interest in either sound change or the sound patterns of Basque. In this seminar, we will discuss many of the linguistic aspects relevant to theories of sound change with a focus on the Basque language (with occasional case studies from other endangered languages such as Ribagorzan Aragonese or Lakota). Key topics will include phonetically-based sound change, synchronic variation as the seed of change, the role of contact, the advantages of studying change from different perspectives, typologically rare sound changes, and the importance of the precise phonetic documentation of endangered languages for sound change typology and linguistic theory overall.

How are contemporary global communication technologies and the rapid rise of large-scale generative communicative models transforming how we use and understand language? This interdisciplinary seminar course explores the intersections of these technological advancements with the semiotic and discursive analysis of communication in sociocultural life-a methodology developed within linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics since the 1980s. We will investigate topics such as how digital and AI-driven environments interact and mediate communication, power dynamics, and institutional structures; how contemporary communicative technology reshapes discursive practices and, in turn, is influenced by them; how political economy underpins and shapes emerging forms of communicative labor; and how diverse communities negotiate, adapt, or re-create their linguistic practices in response to various existing and emerging forms of globalized media. Particularly, we will explore the application of theories and concepts from linguistic anthropology, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics to analyze and reflect on recent textual and discursive materials arising from generative AI and new forms of human-machine interaction. Readings and materials will be drawn from linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, cognitive science, computer science, the history of science, and Science Studies. Graduate students and 3rd and 4th-year undergraduates; consent required for others.

A foundational principle of cognitive science is that the workings of cognitive systems--whether biological, mechanical, or digital--can be productively represented by the operation of formal computational models. This course provides a survey of popular modeling frameworks (such as Bayesian rational agents, connectionist networks, dynamical systems, etc.), as well as the cognitive phenomena that these models have been used to simulate. We will discuss the theoretical commitments of these models, assess strengths and weaknesses of each framework for addressing different types of cognitive questions, and analyze the implications of these models' successes and failures for our understanding of the mind.

This graduate level seminar will examine the relation between morphosyntax and meaning through the lens of derivational morphology and especially argument structure. At the center of the seminar will be the relation between word-internal and clause structure, and the role of meaning in mediating between them. These questions have become central to debates in the literature with the introduction of Distributed Morphology as a theory of the syntax-semantics interface. Within such debates, DM-inspired approaches are contrasted with so-called lexicalist approaches. We will start with the assumption that DM and Lexicalsm differ in their answers to the following two questions: (a) Is semantic information part of what morphemes encode? (b) Are the mechanisms that form words distinguishable from those that form phrases? Looking closely at phenomena such as the causative alternation, voice morphology, causativization and applicativization, denominal verb formation and nominalization, we will see how different answers to (a) and (b) lead to different analyses, aiming to get a clearer view of what, if anything, is the empirical stake of making specific theoretical choices.

In this seminar we explore the relationship between race and place, honing in on the question of how race dynamics have affected linguistic variation in the Chicago landscape for African American speakers. We examine sociohistorical texts on the migration of African Americans to Chicago, while constructing a sample on which to perform an analysis of one to two linguistic features. This analysis will form the basis of a project that we can potentially use to submit as coauthors for a presentation or paper.

The goal of this course is to explore ways of using large language models for linguistics research. We will begin by building a solid understanding of how large language models work and then take a close look at existing examples work in linguistics and closely related fields that has made innovative use of LLMs as research tools. Finally, we will develop our own (possibly collaborative) project (or projects) to gain practical experience using LLMs in our work. The topic area(s) of the project(s) will be determined based on the interests of the students in the class.

This course is a continuation of Syntax I. The emphasis will be on A'-movement and ellipsis operations within the framework of Principles and Parameters and the Minimalist Program. Although we will examine different types of movement and ellipsis constructions, as well as their interactions, the objective will be to understand to what extent we can develop a general theory of syntax. The course will have a strong cross-linguistic aspect to it, examining data from Irish, Austronesian languages, Mayan languages, Wolof, Russian, Romance, Germanic, and others. The topics will include wh-movement in questions, relative clauses, and other constructions, islands and other constraints on movement, sentence fragments (sluicing, split questions), VP-ellipsis, and gapping.

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.