2019-20

Word order and the syntax-semantics/pragmatics interface: A comparative analysis of Basque, Spanish, and English The goal of this course is two-fold. On the one hand, it is designed to offer a complete picture of some of the major grammatical properties of Basque, a non Indo-European minority (and typologically isolated) language (around 750 thousand speakers) which is spoken in a small territory, split on both sides of the western border between France and Spain. On the other hand, we will discuss and offer an analysis of a set of specific properties of Basque related to word order and the syntax semantics/pragmatics interface and put them into a broader perspective on the basis of a comparative analysis with other languages, especially Spanish and English. We will focus on three major theoretical issues - focalization, interrogative sentences and negation- as well as the interactions between them. We will present the major phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic/pragmatic properties exhibited by the structures under analysis, discuss previous approaches in the literature, and offer new alternative analyses.

The Advanced Experimental Methods class provides comprehensive training on specific experimental paradigms/methods in language science research. In the current quarter we will focus on the EEG methods. Students will develop practical skills by carrying out a project, learning about the experimental design, data collection and data analysis procedures. In addition to the methodology training, we will also read and discuss how EEG is applied to address theoretical and empirical questions in the domain of language and cognition. Prior to this class, students should have taken the graduate level Experimental Methods class or the equivalent.

Course Description: TBD.

In this seminar course we will review the "creole exceptionalism" tradition against the uniformitarian view, according to which creoles have emerged and evolved like other, natural and non-creole languages. We will situate creoles in the context of the plantation settlement colonies that produced them and compare their emergence specifically with that of languages such as English and the Romance languages in Europe. We will also compare these evolutions with those of new colonial varieties of European languages (such as Amish English, mainstream American English varieties, Brazilian Portuguese, and Québécois French) which emerged around the same time but are not considered creoles. Using the comparative approach (in evolutionary theory), we will assess whether the criteria used in the genetic classification of languages have been applied uniformly to creole and non-creole languages. In return, we will explore ways in which genetic creolistics can inform and improve genetic linguistics (including historical dialectology).

This course is an introduction to sociolinguistics, the study of language in its social context. We will look at variation at all levels of language and how this variation constructs and is constructed by identity and culture, including relationships between language and social class, language and gender, and language and ethnicity. We will also discuss language attitudes and ideologies, as well as some of the educational, political, and social repercussions of language variation and standardization.

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.

Topic TBD - a graduate course exploring current research in a particular topic in computational linguistics.

This is the second in a two-course sequence providing an introduction to topics at the intersection of computation and language, oriented toward linguists and cognitive scientists. In this quarter we will cover more advanced topics in cognitive/linguistic modeling and natural language processing (NLP), applying more complex programming and mathematical foundations. Our goal in this quarter is for students to leave the course able to implement advanced models and conduct novel research in cognitive/linguistic modeling and NLP.

Course Description: TBD.

Control is one of the most long-standing, difficult, well-studied, and basic problems in the syntax-semantics interface. The basic problem can be observed in the simple English sentence Sue tried to open the door: On the surface, a single argument Sue is necessarily interpreted as both as the one who tried and the one who potentially opened the door. How does this interpretational fact come about given a syntactic analysis of the sentence? The literature of control is rich in both comparative and in-depth language-particular studies. Because of its (surface) simplicity and pervasiveness, control has been a domain that implicates fundamental questions about syntax, semantics, and their interface, such as the division of labor between syntax and semantics in accounting for apparent form-meaning mismatches, and the interplay of lexically specified meaning, compositional principles, and contextual factors, and pragmatic reasoning in interpretation. The seminar will cover both classical and contemporary literature on control phenomena in various languages.