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.
Mon Wed Fri : 10:30 AM-11:20 AM
ASLG 10100.
Spoken in ten countries of Eastern and Central Africa, Swahili has more speakers than any other language in the Bantu family, a group of more than 400 languages most prevalent in sub-equatorial Africa. Based on Swahili Grammar and Workbook, this course helps the students master key areas of the Swahili language in a fast yet enjoyable pace. Topics include sound and intonation patterns, noun class agreements, verb moods, and sentence structures. 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.
Tue Thu : 02:00 PM-03:20 PM
This is a general introduction course with no specific prerequisites.
Swahili is the most popular language of Sub-Saharan Africa, spoken in most countries of Eastern and Central Africa by more than 50 million people. Swahili is characterized by the typical complex Bantu structure. However, it is particularly easy to pronounce and fast learned. The Elementary Swahili series is designed to help students acquire communicative competence in Swahili and a basic understanding of its structures. The course presents basic phonological, grammatical, and syntactic patterns of Kiswahili. Through a variety of exercises, students develop communicative functionality in listening, speaking, reading and writing. Emphasis is put on dialogues and role-plays, individual and group presentations, and the use of audiovisual and web-based resources. Swahili culture and African culture in general are an important component of the course. At the end of the elementary course series, the students are able to communicate efficiently in everyday life situations, write and present short descriptive notes about elementary pieces of verbal creation (documentaries and video series in Swahili). This course allows fulfilling the non-Indo-European language requirement.
Tue Thu : 11:00 AM-12:20 PM
SWAH 25200/35200.
This course expands on the material presented in MOGK 20100, enabling students to speak about topics related to employment, current events and issues of public and community interest.
Mon Wed Fri : 12:30 PM-01:20 PM
MOGK 20100.
This course offers a rapid review of the basic patterns of the language and expands the material presented in MOGK 10100/30100.
Mon Wed Fri : 03:30 PM-04:20 PM
MOGK 10100/30100.
Morpho-Semantics. Although the issue of compositionality (the hypothesis that the meaning of complex expressions in based on the meanings of its component parts) is traditionally addressed with respect to phrases and sentences, similar questions arise in the study of word and morpheme meaning. Traditionally, formal semantic work has paid relatively little attention to compositionality within words, and research on theoretical morphology has typically not been based on formal theories of meaning. In the last two decades, prompted partly by the development of Distributed Morphology, a grammatical framework that enriches and complicates the possible interactions between morphology, syntax and semantics, compositionally below the word level has begun to acquire more prominence and attention from both morphologists and semanticists. Through a critical examination of some of this work, and the literature that forms the background for it, the class will attempt to map the different empirical and theoretical stakes involved in constructing a theory of the morphology-semantics interface that is both morphologically and semantically rigorous. The topics will include the semantics of inflectional categories (such as person) and the relation of syntactic categories (parts of speech) to meaning.
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.
The Iberian Peninsula is host to a number of languages. These include not only Spanish and European Portuguese, the dominant languages in Spain and Portugal, respectively, but also minoritized languages such as Galician, Basque, Catalan, and others. This class will investigate the morphosyntax of minoritized Iberian languages, drawing comparisons with the dominant languages in the area (Spanish, Portuguese, and French), which have exerted enormous influence on the minoritized languages due to centuries of contact. The focus will be the morphosyntax of these languages, but we also aim to better understand the complex social, historical, and political forces that have shaped them, as well as the way they continue to be affected by these forces and their long and sometimes fraught relationship with the dominant languages.
