Global Arc

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.

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary area that lies at the intersection of formal linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence. This course introduces core computational methods and concepts in the analysis of strings, grammars and logical inference. Two 90-minute classes.

This course is an introduction to the science of speech sounds (phonetics) and sound systems (phonology). Students will 1) learn how sounds from a wide variety of languages are produced, and learn to produce and transcribe them; 2) understand and analyze the acoustic properties of speech sounds using (free) software; 3) understand the unconscious knowledge speakers have of the rules and constraints that govern their native language's sound system; 4) extract phonological generalizations from phonetic data from various languages; 5) learn about the similarities and differences between the sound systems of the world's languages.

Syntax is the aspect of human language involved in building phrases out of words. How do words combine - like beads on a string? Are words the smallest building blocks of phrases? How can we make predictions about what is possible and impossible in these structures? This course aims to answer these questions while focusing on the methods linguists use to analyze natural language expressions. Explorations of universal properties of language structures, as well as the ways in which those structures can vary. Strong emphasis on building and testing hypotheses on the basis of both language data and foundational principles of the field.

The central issues and leading theories of linguistic semantics for natural languages. Analyses of specific linguistic phenomena will be used to illustrate the interaction of syntax and semantics, the relation between language and the world, and the role of linguistic meaning in communication and understanding. Prerequisite: 201 or instructor's permission.

Human language viewed from a social perspective. Topics will include social difference in the use of language, and linguistic differences as a function of geography, social group membership, and social status.

This course delves into the internal composition of words (morphology) across languages. What is a word? What can be inside of a word? Do all languages build words in the same way(s), with the same sorts of ingredients? How similar is word-building to sentence-building? We will engage deeply with both the empirical and theoretical side of this topic, exploring not just morphology, but also its interactions with phonology (sound systems) and syntax (sentence structure). This class is highly interactive and hands-on. Students will develop tools of analysis and argumentation that are applicable in all areas of linguistics and beyond.

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.