Courses

This course is a theoretical and practical introduction to studying phonetics (the science of speech) and its relation to sociolinguistic variation (how speech systematically varies across speakers). Throughout the course, students will collect their own conversational speech data and learn to conduct acoustic analysis. Skills developed in the course include recording speech, transcribing, data processing and normalization, and effective presentation of results.

There is a complex relationship between language and society. This course examines how language variation is tied to identity and the role of language in human social interaction. We will consider language as it relates to social status, age, gender, ethnicity, and location as well as theoretical models used to study variation. We will also examine how language is used in conversation, in the media, and beyond using ethnography of communication and discourse analysis. You will become more aware of how language is used in your own daily life and will be able to argue sociolinguistic perspectives on language attitudes.

What lies behind the human urge to construct new languages? How has language invention changed over time? What can invented languages teach us about the function of natural languages and their syntactic, morphological, and phonological structure? In this course, students will dive into the history of invented languages, tackle the question of what constitutes a language, and ultimately try their hand at constructing their own language. We’ll explore what separates natural languages from invented ones and discuss how often the very qualities that their creators find most desirable inhibit the widespread adoption they envision for their languages.

Languages vary in what kind of information is morphologically expressed. The form words take is, in part, governed by complex systems called “case” and “agreement.” In general, case refers to forms of nouns, and agreement refers to forms of verbs. We go beyond familiar case patterns in which subjects are Nominative and objects are Accusative and familiar agreement patterns in which verbs display the person, gender, and/or number of subjects. We investigate the morphological patterns in at least a dozen (probably more!) languages with the goals of arriving at both cross-linguistic generalizations and language-particular nuances. No familiarity with languages other than English is required.

Why does German sometimes put the verb second and sometimes at the end, and how did this strange arrangement emerge? What differentiates the Scandinavian languages from Germanic tongues from more central latitudes? How did Germans come to say Apfel, while English and Dutch speakers say apple/appel? This course will explore these and similar questions, providing a linguistic overview of the German language and investigating key historical developments in the Germanic language family. Key topics will include dialectal variation, historical sound change, and syntactic structure, with primary focus on German and some attention to the Germanic language family as a whole.

A central part of the grammar of a language is the meaning associated with words and phrases. This course explores the multi-faceted system that speakers access both when producing sentences and when interpreting them. Topics include the complexity surrounding actually defining words, the meanings of various modal verbs, and theories of pragmatics and the rules of conversation, among other topics. Content will differ slightly, depending on whether students have had previous linguistics courses or not.

Humans are unique among animals in that we are able to attain native speaker competency in any language(s) we receive a sufficient amount of exposure to during our development. The path of acquisition is remarkably stable regardless of the language(s) being acquired, and is believed to yield insights into the nature of human language. In this course, we explore children’s capacity to acquire language, with a focus on its implications for linguistic theory. Topics include acquisition of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, and acquisition in extraordinary circumstances.

Code-switching, or shifting between two shared languages, is a common practice of bilinguals around the globe. This course reviews key linguistic research on code-switching, focusing particularly on when and why code-switching occurs and what linguistic, cultural, and cognitive restrictions it is subject to. These questions will take us on a wide-ranging exploration of bilingualism as a phenomenon, touching on sociolinguistic issues, questions of language structure, and the impacts of code-switching on pronunciation, as well as a variety of issues in the study of multilingualism broadly construed, such as how bilinguals maintain multiple linguistic systems within a single cognitive environment.

This course explores how languages form words and how contemporary theories account for this complicated process. We concentrate primarily on the interaction between morphology and syntax, but we may also explore the relationship between morphology and phonology. While we will investigate a wide variety of languages, no familiarity with any language other than English is required.

Semantics is the study of what words and constructions mean in a language and how speakers come to actually interpret those meanings. In this course we explore several objects of inquiry within the field of semantics, including compositional semantics (i.e., the computation of meaning over syntactic structures), lexical semantics (with a particular emphasis on verb meanings), and how the various interpretations of ambiguous constructions are derived.

Why do some people acquiring a second language obtain a pronunciation indistinguishable from that of native speakers, while others, despite excellent skills in the areas of syntax, semantics, and vocabulary, never shed their “foreign accent”? In this seminar, we will explore theoretical models that examine the impact of factors like age of acquisition, length of residence, motivation, learning environment, language identity, and native language on the phonetics and phonology of second language acquisition, looking at speech production and perception. The course will be organized around a term-long collaborative research project, with goals and topics set by the class.