2024-25

This course introduces linguistic patterns of speech play and verbal art (SPVA), including parallelism, jokes, language games, sound symbolism, puns, ideophones, poetry, and other expressive strategies. We examine how speakers of indigenous and minority languages around the world use these strategies in everyday speech, and discuss how native intuitions and interpretations of SPVA data provide a key to understanding epistemologies, social identities, power and inequalities, and language ideologies. Through a humanistic and scientific lens, we will theorize how SPVA pushes the boundaries of iconicity, creativity, and variation. The everyday use of SPVA becomes central to understanding the language, culture, society, and individual nexus.

This is a survey course in the psychology of language. We will focus on issues related to language comprehension, language production, and language acquisition. The course will also train students on how to read primary literature and conduct original research studies.

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)

Language tends to follow predictable patterns, from what sounds and words are about to be uttered, to what grammatical structures are likely, to be used to what broader implications are about to be suggested, and more. One prevailing hypothesis is that the human mind can take advantage of this predictability to help maintain the rapid pace of language comprehension. This course will explore critical questions surrounding the nature of prediction processes during language comprehension. What do people predict? How are their predictions constrained? How can we study the inherently internal process(es) of prediction? What are the consequences of prediction? Perhaps most importantly, what do the answers to these questions suggest about the mechanisms and computations of prediction? Readings will primarily consist of contemporary articles from peer-reviewed journals, and class meetings will be a mix of lectures and student-led discussions.

This course, based primarily on insights from the field of linguistic anthropology, focuses on the relationship, in theory and in practice, between language, gender, and sexuality. We begin with a brief overview of the field and some of its major theoretical developments. Then, we expand on themes of social change, desire and identity, difference, kinship, and the significance of global, transnational and postcolonial connections in our understandings of gender and sexuality. The practical component of the course includes critical analysis of language and other signs that are used to enact gender and sexuality (e.g., in drag shows, communities you belong to personally, online communities, and current events). Throughout this course, we will emphasize the importance of ethnographic approaches to languages and communication-a hallmark of linguistic anthropology that requires a reflexive and critical attentiveness to how researchers co-participate in everyday social interactions with their interlocutors. Beyond the categories of gender and sexuality as studied in Western academic contexts, this course invites students to pay close attention to how non-normative forms of alterity are produced and circulated in the Global South under conditions of political and economic inequality.

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.

This course will cover basic topics in experiment design, data collection, and statistical analysis. To demonstrate different design and methodological considerations, we will look at data sets from different research methods including self-paced reading, acceptability judgment, production, etc. In addition, we will cover statistical methods including t-tests, ANOVAs, linear/logistic regressions and mixed-effect models. Students will gain hands-on experience using R as a data analysis tool. This course is meant to prepare students for more advanced data analytic courses in the future. Previous experience in R is not required.

This course familiarizes students with what it means to study meaning and use in natural language. By "meaning" we refer to the (for the most part, logical) content of words, constituents, and sentences (semantics), and by "use" we intend to capture how this content is implemented in discourse and what kinds of additional dimensions of meaning may then arise (pragmatics). Some of the core empirical phenomena that have to do with meaning are introduced: lexical (i.e., word) meaning, reference, quantification, logical inferencing, presupposition, implicature, context sensitivity, cross-linguistic variation, speech acts. Main course goals are not only to familiarize students with the basic topics in semantics and pragmatics but also to help them develop basic skills in semantic analysis and argumentation.

This course introduces students to experimental and computational methods used in linguistic research. Students will gain foundational knowledge of experimental design, stimuli creation, procedure, and data collection and analysis through hands-on practice. Students will design their own research projects, identify appropriate experimental and/or computational methods, and apply them to investigate their questions. Students will learn to use PCIbex (a web-based platform for constructing experiments), R, and Python throughout the process. Familiarity with R/Python/JavaScript is helpful but not required.

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.