Global Arc

This course examines the complex mental and neurological processes that underlie linguistic knowledge and behavior. It will be concerned with the precise description and measurement of language activity, with its governing principles, and with available indices for the associated neural computations and their location in the brain. Seminar.

During the past half century, enormous strides have been made by linguists, philosophers, and cognitive psychologists in coming to an understanding of the human language faculty. Some of this progress has direct implications for the legal system. This course is designed to study some of the most interesting of these interactions. In particular, it will ask how this learning should cause us to question some of the tacit assumptions about language that are embedded in the law, and how knowledge about the human language faculty can bear directly on the resolution of disputes within the legal system. Two 90-minute seminars.

Examines how language is processed in real-time in the human brain. The focus will be on the mental representations that characterize human language, and the cognitive operations that are necessary to construct them during comprehension and production. Students will be introduced to behavioral (reaction time), electrophysiological (EEG, MEG), and neuroimaging (fMRI, PET) results that identify the representations and processes of language processing, and the cortical architectures that support them.

The invention of writing was a major breakthrough in human history since it allowed us to record and convey information beyond our immediate surroundings. This course zooms in on the history and linguistics of writing/reading. The first half of the course discusses the origins and typology of writing systems, as well as the role of phonology, morphology, and other levels of linguistic structure in their design. In the second half, we focus on psycholinguistic aspects of writing/reading, namely, how graphic representations map onto mental representations of words, opening a window into the ways adults read across languages and writing systems.

An introduction to linguistic analysis, with an emphasis on hands-on work. Making use of as many different sorts of resources as possible -- animate, inanimate; written, spoken; town, gown -- we will try as a group to understand the history and current state of language at Princeton University and in Princeton, NJ just outside the "Orange Bubble." What languages and what modes of communication have and have not been used here? When? Why? How? By whom? We will discover the answers by exploring archives, conducting interviews, and generally engaging in original and creative research.

This course is a primer in Construction Grammar, a cognitively and functionally oriented framework in which syntactic representations are understood as conventionalized associations between form and function. Focus will be on the framework's analytic methods and on articulating generalizations on the basis of authentic spoken data. We will examine the ways in which variation in grammatical form can be systematically captured and explained. Using material from English and from various less familiar languages, we will also explore the question in what sense the constructional approach can serve as a universal model of language.

As educated users of language, many of us have strong feelings about it, such as how we should use it ("That isn't what 'literally' means!") and why. Which of these feelings are valid and which are closer to folklore? In this class, we investigate many preconceptions about language, objectively explore their validity as myth or fact, and make conclusions about how human languages can(not) be described. Topics may include whether: women talk more than men, children learn languages better than adults, legalese is more precise, dolphins use language, all languages/dialects are equally sophisticated, and bilingualism makes you smarter.

This course investigates language in its social, cultural, political, and historical contexts. Does your native language influence your perception, your behavior, and your culture? How does your identity influence properties of your language? What happens when unrelated languages come into contact for prolonged periods? How are new languages born? Why isn't English the official language of the United States, and should it be? We will explore these questions (and more) by engaging with the often contradictory opinions of specialists and the public, as well as with the empirical realities behind these different language situations.

About 2000 of the world's 6000 to 7000 languages are spoken in Africa. The diversity that characterizes these languages is exceptional, but very little is known to non-specialists. In this course, we will learn about the languages of Africa: the diversity of their linguistic structures (including famous features that are found nowhere else, e.g. click consonants), their history and the history of their speakers (from ca 10,000 BP to the (post) colonial period), and their cultural contexts, among other topics. This course has no prerequisites, and is open to anyone with an interest in African languages or the African continent.

This introductory course considers empirical data from African American English (AAE) in addressing ways that formal approaches in linguistics can account for inter- and intra-speaker variation in the dialect. This course will be in three parts: (1) a general overview of linguistic variation and a review of traditional approaches to the study of variation in AAE; (2) an exploration of the ways variation in AAE and other English dialects can be analyzed using methods in syntax; and (3) an examination of the ways in which AAE-speaking children learn the linguistic variations in their speech communities. Two 90-minute classes.