Global Arc

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?

Course examines the interconnection between linguistics, structure, and language use. By studying how real people use language in concrete situations, we will identify general principles that govern verbal interaction in speech, writing, and electronic discourse. Using material from various languages we will address: presupposition, inferencing, and implicature; managing information flow in general discourse; conversational strategies; the nature and purposes of non-literal language; language variation and change; linguistic politeness; language and gender; language and power; and linguistics and cultural relativity.

Morphology (word structure) and syntax (sentence structure) are typically treated as distinct disciplines. This course explores the ways that morphology and syntax interact. We will look at recent proposals and integrate morphology and syntax. Special attention is paid to the proposal that the unification of morphology and syntax is based on Argument Structure, which is part of each verb's entry in the speaker's mental lexicon and is defined as the representation of the relation between the verb and its arguments. A verb's arguments are realized in syntactic structure as subject, direct object, and oblique object.

The history of syntactic theory from Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957) to the present, examining the evolution of mechanisms and principles of syntactic analysis, their empirical and conceptual motivation. Topics include phrase structure and transformations; constraints on rules and representations; the role of the lexicon; how syntactic structure intersects with interpretation, especially with anaphora. This course charts the shift in focus from complex language-specific grammatical rules to simple abstract grammatical mechanisms whose behavior is governed by general principles that apply across languages.

This course is an introduction to linguistics decipherment. We will survey cases of successful - and unsuccessful - decipherment, beginning with Ancient Egyptian and covering such languages as Old Persian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Mycenean Greek and Mayan. Throughout the focus will be on the methodologies employed, and on the conditions that need to be present for decipherment to be possible.

This course provides a thorough intro to the principles and practice of linguistic fieldwork. Students will be trained in methods of language description and analysis based on data provided by a native speaker of an unfamiliar language. A wide range of topics will be covered, from data collection techniques to the theoretically informed analysis of the collected data, and all major subfields of linguistics will be involved. This course is designed for students interested in documentary/descriptive linguistic work and those interested in incorporating linguistics data into research in theoretical linguistics.

In modern linguistics it is assumed that a speaker's knowledge of syntactic structure can be accessed via introspection about whether a linguistic expression is or is not deviant. This yes/no task has always been limited in the kind of information is provides about the underlying structure of language. We will look at various more probing experimental methods that have been proposed for accessing speakers' knowledge of grammar via judgment tasks, and then try them for ourselves. In the end, we will study a small part of the grammar by using an appropriate technique in an experiment to see if we can learn something new about language.

This course is a hands-on exploration of language typology. Each student will work with a different endangered language to help us, as a class, answer typological questions across various domains of language (sounds, words, sentences, etc.). Along what lines do languages vary? How much can languages differ from each other? Are any linguistic properties shared across all human languages, and if so, how do we explain them? How do signed languages fit into this picture, and what's all that buzz about Pirahã? Through answering these questions, we will build up and engage with various models and theories of language variation.

This course explores the question of how we know what words mean, with data drawn from English and other languages. In a combination of lectures and hands-on data analysis, students will learn about several basic approaches to the ways in which meaning may be best defined. Related topics include questions of how speakers organize their knowledge of word meaning, how meaning relates to the conceptual apparatus, how maning interacts with cultural factors, and how it changes over time. Various semantic domains will be examined in detail, such as color terms, kinship terms, verb meaning, the language of emotions, politeness expressions.

This course provides a hands-on introduction to the use of electroencephalography (EEG) in language research. Students will be introduced to the fundamentals of EEG as a tool for cognitive neuroscience, as well as the specific goals and logic of EEG experiments in the study of language processing. Students will design, deploy, and analyze a novel EEG experiment during the course of the semester.