Global Arc

An intermediate language course that aims to strengthen students' communication and comprehension skills. Students will broaden their grammar, vocabulary, and Deaf culture knowledge through viewing and analyzing various ASL literary works and films. Students will also practice holding conversations about a wide variety of topics following Deaf cultural norms through interactive activities.

The world's astonishing linguistic diversity owes to the fact that languages change, and that each language takes a unique and unpredictable trajectory of change. In this course, students explore different models of change and the forces behind it. Employing core methodologies (the Comparative Method and Method of Internal Reconstruction), students learn to analyze phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic language changes. We also learn about the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European language and the people who spoke it. Strong focus on applying methods to a variety of data sets.

Where does language come from? How do we know that you can't say it that way? And who has the authority to tell you? Why are some sentences better than others? Why do the same words differently organized have different effects? This course is about human language, its nature, use, users, and origin, based primarily on English. Major topics include the structure of sentences, paragraphs, words; language and thought; and the historical and biological origins of language. Two 90-minute classes.

This course offers intensive practice in American Sign Langauge (ASL) through learning specialized vocabulary, analyzing grammar, developing ASL-English translation skills, and discussing ASL literary works and Deaf culture.

This course explores the history, culture, and language of the Deaf in the United States. The first part of the course focuses on the history of Deaf people in the United States. The second part discusses various aspects of Deaf culture: language, literature, art, politics, etc. The third part critically examines different issues facing Deaf people here in the United States and around the world. These issues include audism, linguicism, ableism, intersectionality, bioethics, and education.

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.