2019-20

This course deals with a variety of topics specific to Linguistic Pedagogy.

Undergraduates who have taken both may petition the instructor for admission. This course is an advanced graduate seminar in syntax. Through readings from the primary research literature, we will investigate the nature, properties, and precise formulation of some of the elementary (and perhaps some not-so-elementary) operations that build the syntactic structures of human language.

This course will cover the basic methods for experimental studies, including experimental design, data collection and statistical analysis. To demonstrate different design and analysis tools, we will look at data set from different types of studies, including self-paced reading, acceptability judgment, eye tracking, ERP, etc. Students will also gain hands-on experience on different paradigms.

Among topics discussed in the first half of the sequence are the formal structure of semiotic systems, the ethnographically crucial incorporation of linguistic forms into cultural systems, and the methods for empirical investigation of "functional" semiotic structure and history.

This is the first in a two-course sequence designed to provide a foundation in the scientific study of all aspects of linguistic meaning. The first quarter focuses primarily on pragmatics: those aspects of meaning that arise from the way that speakers put language to use, rather than through the formal properties of the linguistic system itself, which is the domain of semantics. However, a central goal of the course will be to begin to develop an understanding of the relation between pragmatics and semantics, by exploring empirical phenomena in which contextual and conventional aspects of meaning interact in complex but regular and well-defined ways, and by learning analytical techniques that allow us to tease these two aspects of linguistics meaning apart.

Graduate student standing. Undergraduates with a grade of A or A- in Intro to Syntax may petition the instructor for admission. This course is an advanced survey of topics in graduate syntax examining current syntactic theory through detailed analysis of a range of phenomena and readings from the primary research literature.

This course introduces cross-linguistic phonological phenomena and methods of analysis through an indepth examination of fundamental notions that transcend differences between theoretical approaches: contrast, neutralization, natural classes, distinctive features, and basic non-linear phonological processes (e.g., assimilation, harmony, dissimilation).

Linguists use a variety of different tools to answer a diverse set of questions. This course will focus on the experimental methodologies linguists use in the laboratory, and will address all aspects of experimentation, including design, data collection and analysis. First, this course will provide a foundational overview to the different experimental paradigms from across the subfields of linguistics. Then, as a class, we will workshop a phonetics experiment using eye-tracking, with hands-on opportunities for students through each step of the process. By the end of the quarter, students will have the tools to propose and pilot an experiment of their own design in any area of linguistics.

This course is an introduction to geometric approaches to meaning in natural language. We will discuss methods which represent the meaning of linguistic entities (words, paragraphs, etc.) as objects in Euclidean space, and seek to find meaningful patterns in the relative positions of these objects. The course will motivate the approach, examine its strengths and limitations, and prepare students for further study in an active field of research.

This course dissects the linguistic forms and semiotics processes by which experts (often called professionals) persuade their clients, competitors, and the public to trust them and rely on their forms of knowledge. We consider the discursive aspects of professional training (e.g., lawyers, economists, accountants) and take a close look at how professions (e.g., social work, psychology, medicine) stage interactions with clients. We examine a central feature of modern life-the reliance on experts - by analyzing the rhetoric and linguistic form of expert knowledge.