Faculty of Arts & Sciences

What do the world's almost 7,000 languages have in common? Why do they show recurrent commonalities and principled differences? What do they reveal about the human ability for speaking and thinking? How do languages develop? How do they die? This course addresses these and related questions while introducing the languages of the world; their distribution, recurrent structural properties, and genetic classification; processes of language contact; and the relationship between language and the brain.

Intensive study in a selected linguistic area such as phonology, syntax, historical linguistics, phonetics, morphology, semantics, psycholinguistics, acquisition, sociolinguistics, creole studies, or computational linguistics. Meets as two six-week small-group tutorials, in the spring term.

Individual tutorial with a faculty member.

Individual tutorial with a faculty member for research and writing of the Linguistics honors thesis. Graded Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory. An honors student who expects not to complete the thesis should consult with the Head Tutor about completing other substantial work to receive credit for the course.

What determines how the words in a sentence are put together in a given language? This course introduces the field of syntax, and the study of order and structure among words. Students will learn to construct and evaluate syntactic analyses and argumentation and will be exposed to variation and universals in the syntactic patterns found in natural languages. The course will also provide an introductory survey of syntactic phenomena, including question formation, the passive, anaphora, and agreement.

What are the sounds of the world languages, and how are they organized to make words and sentences? Why are some sounds hard to hear or make? Is there a `universal inventory' of sounds? This class introduces students to the sounds of the world's languages, and provides tools for studying them systematically. We will study the setup to transfer thoughts from one brain to another.

An introduction to the historical study of the Indo-European languages, using the comparative method to arrive at a picture of the parent language of the family, Proto-Indo-European.

This course provides an intensive introduction to generative syntactic theory. Emphasis on syntactic argumentation. Topics center on foundational problems in the theory of syntax, including phrase structure of nominals and clauses, varieties of movement, locality, argument structure, ellipsis case agreement, and the syntax-semantics interface.

This graduate level class is an intensive introduction to phonological theory and experimental work in phonology. This includes rule-based and constraint-based approaches, the typology of phonological processes (vowel and consonant harmony, assimilation and dissimilation, lenition and fortition, etc.), and phonological acquisition. Experimental approaches will deal with gradience, exceptionality, and productivity with an introduction to the quantitative methodologies that these phenomena require.

Instruction in the elicitation of phonological, morphological, and syntactic information from a native speaker of an unfamiliar language, with the object of developing a grammatical sketch of the language. Emphasis on methodology and problems of elicitation and grammatical description in the field. Participants work directly with the native speaker, both individually and as a group, with the assistance of the instructor.

Designed as a sequel to Linguistics 107. A detailed overview of Indo-European comparative grammar, with emphasis on recent developments and discoveries.

Explores issues at the interface of linguistic semantics, pragmatics and psychology. Introduces how the analysis of meaning has been pursued by linguists and psychologists. Focuses on topics that are both of central interest to theoretical linguistics and the target of experimental research. These include sentence structure, sentential connectives, quantification, numbers, mass-count distinction, adjectives and comparison, scales and modalities.

Provides an introduction to the study of cross-linguistic variation and analyzes alternative approaches to language universals (functional explanations, processing explanations, explanations in terms of universal grammar). Topics to be studied include word order, case marking, agreement, lexical categories, subject-hood, and information structure. Sampling techniques and the use of hierarchies will also be covered.

How do children manage to learn the sounds, the words and the grammar of their native language in three years or less? Does the language that we speak change how we think? What happens in the mind (and brain) that allows us to convert sound into meaning during language comprehension (and meaning into motor movements during language production)? Why are human languages similar to each other in some ways, and what allows them to vary in others? We will explore these questions integrating the perspectives of linguistics, psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Introduction to the syntactic structure of Mandarin Chinese: the basic structure of clauses and nominal constituents; words, compounds, and phrases; word order and variations; selected special topics (passives, resultatives, ba-construction, topic and relativized structures, questions, anaphora, pro drop); syntactic structure and semantic interpretation.

Examination of phenomena of tense and aspect in Japanese, with special attention to verbal semantics and the interaction of temporal categories with modality and transitivity.

An examination of evidence from the comparative method, internal reconstruction, and written documents for reconstructing prehistoric stages of the Japanese language and an overview of major developments in Japanese phonology and grammar from the Nara period through the present day

An overview of second-language teaching and learning focused on theoretical models, learning objectives, developmental stages, materials design, and the use of new technology in teaching. The course explores the nature of second language acquisition, focused specifically on the needs of graduate students teaching a second language.

An exploration of issues related to the architecture of the grammar, with emphasis on the structures that are interpreted at the semantic interface, and how they are derived.

Current issues in semantics. Topics to possibly include: Scope and anaphoric properties of indefinites, quantificational variability and generic uses, long distance indefinites.

This course addresses topics of current interest in phonological theory, potentially including competing constraint grammar frameworks, learnability, naturalness biases, prosody, quantitative approaches (experimental or corpus-driven), variation, gradience, and the morphological interface.

An examination of why phonological phenomena exist at all, and the nature of phonological computation. Primarily exemplification from harmony, reduplication, and meter. Design conditions imposed by economy, perception, articulation, the learning path, and the lexicon.

The topic for the year will be arranged in consultation with interested students. Conducted as a seminar.

Advanced readings in Hittite and an introduction to Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic Luvian.

Investigation of selected topics in Germanic historical linguistics.

Readings in canonical Old Church Slavonic texts and later Church Slavonic redactions.

In-depth investigation of topics in computational linguistics and natural-language processing. Students discuss research papers and undertake a significant research project. This term, the course will focus on synchronous grammars and their use for formal modeling of the semantics of natural language, including background on Montague grammar, pertinent logic, lambda calculus, applications to machine translation and other language-processing problems.