Global Arc

Intonation is used in a language like English for several purposes. Different intonation contours signal different sentence types--questions, for example, have systematically different "tunes" from declarative statements, as do rebuttals, heges, and other speech-act types. In addition, the placement of the intonation nucleus signals what is new and what is old information, as in the difference between "JOHN died" and "John DIED." The course explores the principles of phonology, syntax, semantics and discourse structure that constitute our present understanding of such phenomena, both in English and across different language types.

This course covers the linguistic, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, and sociolinguistic aspects of bilingualism. We examine language acquisition in monolingual and bilingual children, the notion of "critical age" for language acquisition, definitions and measurements of bilingualism, and the verbal behavior of bilinguals such as code-switching. We consider the effects of bilingualism on other cognitive domains, including memory, and examine neurolinguistic evidence comparing the brains of monolinguals and bilinguals. Societal and governmental attitudes toward bilingualism in countries like India and the U.S. are contrasted.

This course explores intonation (the melodic patterns of sentences), addressing questions like: What does punctuation (e.g., a comma) sound like? How can we measure intonation, acoustically? How is intonation different from "tone" in languages like Mandarin? How do we transcribe intonation and analyze it? Students learn how to use laboratory methods and computer software to study intonation in spoken languages. (We focus on Mainstream American English but study other languages/dialects as well.) We also examine how intonational features relate to other aspects of language, such as sentence structure, linguistic meaning, and social context.

What does it mean to understand an utterance? By producing and hearing utterances, we learn new things about the world and about the interlocutors, and communicate our own beliefs and desires. How does this happen? What types of inferences do we make in the process? This course provides an overview of how linguistics meaning and inferences have been analyzed from various angles. We will investigate key issues concerning 'meaning' in compositional/lexical semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. Topics will comprise types of linguistic inferences, and connections between language and time, causation and identity.

Linguistic analysis of American Sign Language, covering phonology, syntax, and semantics.

Pronunciation of words involves more than simply stringing vowels and consonants together. This course examines how pitch, duration and intensity - the three phonetic correlates of prosodic events - are used in language to structure words. We will learn how speech sounds are organized into rhythmic patterns and how prosodic features interact with the rhythmic structure. We will explore the notions of stress, accent and tone and survey a variety of word prosodic systems from around the world. We will also consider how such systems arise and the historical transformations they may undergo.

What does it mean to know a language? Is it something we learn or something the brain "grows?" What aspects of language are innate? Is parents' speech important in language learning? An examination of the properties of child language through the lens of current linguistic theory. Two 90-minute classes.

Linguists, philosophers, and cognitive psychologists have made great strides in understanding the human language faculty. Some of this progress has direct implications for the legal system. In this course we investigate some of the tactic 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 classes. Prerequisite: 215 or instructor's permission.

This course will expand your knowledge of linguistic phenomena and linguistic theory through the lens of Lithuanian, an understudied Baltic language. Our focus will be on morphological and syntactic phenomena, covering topics such as compounding, gender features, affixation, passive vs. impersonal constructions, and case. Throughout the course, we will address historical and sociolinguistic factors that have influenced the linguistic structure of Lithuanian, its dialects, and other Baltic languages like Latvian and Latgalian. We will also draw typological connections between Baltic and other language families, especially Slavic and Germanic.

This course emphasizes the commonalities among words, idioms and more abstract syntactic patterns in that all are pairings of form and function. This emphasis allows us to draw many parallels between language and other cognitive processes such as categorization, parallels that in turn raise the issue of whether language may emerge from a combination of general cognitive abilities, without requiring a unique language faculty. We will ask: How do children generalize beyond what they hear in order to learn their rich and complex knowledge of language? How can we explain the fact that there exist generalizations that hold across languages?