Courses

We've all been taught that nouns are people, places, and things. Yet, these seemingly simple linguistic objects are surprisingly complex. For instance, languages vary in what information (e.g., case, gender, person, number) nouns display. Even within a single language, the form of a noun may change depending on its function within a sentence or its function within a conversation. This course uses contemporary linguistic theories to account for the many varied forms of nouns throughout the world's languages. No familiarity with languages other than English is required.

This course explores dialectology, the study of dialects. Participants learn the field’s history before turning to World Englishes, with special attention to the current dialects of American English. We analyze the earliest colonial American English dialects, highlighting language contact with indigenous and other languages, the linguistic impact of the Atlantic slave trade, and subsequent impacts of westward migration. Participants also assess speakers’ perceptions of dialects; analyze dialectal variation as portrayed in media, either accurately or stereotypically; and re-examine what constitutes standard/non-standard dialects, and how ‘standardness’ has changed over time. Not open to students who have taken LING 140. 

This course introduces participants to sociophonetics, a field of study that weds theories of phonetics (the study of the science of speech) to the methodological approaches of sociolinguistics, and which examines the relationships between linguistic variation and speaker identity. Participants consider the acoustic characteristics of vowels, consonants, and prosody; the variation that occurs across these; and how this variation impacts the production and perception of speech. Working with natural speech data, participants learn to use Praat to assess articulatory variation, and contextualize their findings against the backdrop of previous sociophonetic literature.

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. Recommended Preparation: Either previous or concurrent enrollment in any Carleton Linguistics courses or knowledge of German or another Germanic language (not English). concurrent enrollment in GERM 101 or higher satisfies the knowledge of German requirement.

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.

What moves where, how, and for what purpose? In this course, participants explore accounts of various types of syntactic movement within the Minimalist Program. After an introduction to Minimalism, we read, discuss, and evaluate primary literature. This course offers an overview of the progression of generative syntactic theory from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, with a focus on objectively comparing competing analyses. By the end of the course, participants will have familiarity with scholarly literature on theoretical syntax; with evaluating and critiquing existing theoretical analyses; and with proposing and defending a novel analysis.

Participants in this course learn how to design and conduct sociolinguistic research, with a focus on the varieties of English spoken in Minnesota. After an introduction to the quantitative sociolinguistic methods used to obtain large data sets of naturalistic speech (publicly available data, online questionnaires, individual and group interviews, and ethnography), participants design studies investigating the status of a phonetic or phonological linguistic variable typically attributed to regional Englishes. The course culminates in a pilot study assessing the status of these variables in the speech of Minnesotans. 

This course prepares students to engage in the research needed for their comps projects. Students will identify a research topic, begin engaging with the relevant literature, and deliver presentations throughout the term. By the end of fall term, students will have a portion of their comps drafted in preparation for the independent research and writing component during winter term.