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.

Independent study with a faculty member. For students who wish to pursue a particular linguistic topic not covered in other course offerings.

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.

Meets as two six-week small-group tutorials, both held in the fall term, each covering one of the areas of linguistics listed under Linguistics 97r.

Individual tutorial with a faculty member.

Group tutorial led by the Head Tutor with the participation of students' thesis advisors 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.

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.

This course introduces components of study of language: phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. It presents the view that knowledge of language is best characterized as an unconsciously internalized set of abstract rules and principles. Evidence is drawn from a variety of signed and spoken languages, language universals, child language acquisition, language change, language games, and language disorders.

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.

This course investigates the nature and structure of words through the lens of contemporary morphological theory. What's in a word? Topics include the place of word formation in relation to phonological and syntactic phenomena, morphological processes, and the nature of the lexicon. Emphasis on the analysis of morphological phenomena in a range of typologically diverse languages.

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 introductory course on semantic interpretation in natural language. What does it mean to "know the meaning" of an utterance? This course provides the tools to characterize and study the meanings of sentences. Topics covered include the relation between form and meaning, ambiguity, reference, context dependency, and the role of logic vs. pragmatics in communication.

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.

Methods and goals of linguistic reconstruction. Topics include the regularity of sound change, types of linguistic change, the relationship between linguistic reconstruction and synchronic analysis, language contact and borrowing, and mechanisms of linguistic change, including recent theories.

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 course provides an intensive introduction to morphological theory. Students will be introduced to current research and areas of debate in morphology proper, in morpho-syntax, and in morpho-phonology.

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.

An introductory course on semantics in generative grammar. This course provides the formal tools to investigate the truth-conditional meanings of sentences. Topics covered include: compositionality, type theory and the fundamentals of clause structure, quantifier scope, and variable-binding.

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.

An introduction to diachronic linguistics at the graduate level. Theory of language change: sound change and analogy, syntactic and semantic change, change in progress. The comparative method: proving genetic relationship, reconstruction, and subgrouping.

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

A survey of current psycholinguistics research for students in linguistics and related fields. Provides an overview of models of language comprehension and production from word to sentence level. Aims to expose students to models and methods used in the study of language acquisition, processing, disorders, and brain imaging.

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.

Selected grammatical phenomena will be examined from a theoretical and experimental perspective, with a view toward answering questions like the following: What theoretical treatments are available? How do experimental studies distinguish among competing theoretical approaches? What kind of future experimental work is needed to resolve the outstanding issues?

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.

Prosody and intonation are intricately linked to many domains of language use and linguistic structure. We examine the phonetic form of prosodic contours and intonational grouping, the function of prosody in expressing semantic and pragmatic information and in disambiguation during sentence production and comprehension, and the use of "implicit" prosody even in silent reading.

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.

An introduction to the comparative and historical linguistics of the Germanic family, with emphasis on Gothic and the early medieval languages.

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.

An examination of selected phenomena in Japanese phonology, morphology, and syntax with special attention to difficulties encountered in the acquisition of Japanese by adult native English speakers.

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.

Introduction to the syntactic structure of Modern Japanese: the structure of clauses and noun phrases and other constituents; selected special topics such as word order and scrambling, relative clauses and other sentence modifiers, passives and causatives, case marking, etc., as they pertain to linguistic theory.

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

This course is an in-depth investigation into comparative Austronesian syntax. The Austronesian language family -- roughly 1,200 genetically-related languages dispersed over an area encompassing Madagascar, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and islands of the Pacific -- exhibits several unusual properties: verb-first word order, ergativity, wh-agreement, articulated voice systems, and cleft structures. The course examines these phenomena from the perspective of comparative Austronesian syntax.

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.

Examination of current issues in syntactic theory with focus on topics of interest to the class.

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.

What is the relationship between a predicate's semantic content and its syntactic realization? What is the relationship between a predicate's event structure and its argument structure? Does a predicate's semantics determine the syntactic frames it occurs in, or might it be the other way around?

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

This course is designed to enable students to follow current research in syntax. Topics vary from year to year; may include head movement, case and agreement, anaphora, functional categories, ellipsis, argument structure, constraints on movement and derivations, and on form-meaning mappings.

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.

Continuation of Linguistics 116. Designed to enable students to follow current research in semantics. Topics covered include: intensional contexts, indexicals, modalities, event based semantics, presuppositions, and formal theories of implicatures.

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.

Topics in Indo-European comparative grammar, including Anatolian. Conducted as a seminar.

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

Grammar and reading of texts in cuneiform and in transliteration; essentials of the comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages of Anatolia.

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

Presentation of reports on current research or assigned topics.

Investigation of selected topics in Germanic historical linguistics.

History of the first Slavic literary language, its role in Slavic civilization; phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of Old Church Slavonic; reading from canonical texts.

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

Introduction to the historical phonology and morphology of the Slavic languages with special attention to relative chronology and linguistic geography.

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.

This course will present and analyze theoretical and experimental aspects of heritage language study. A heritage language is a minority language that an individual was exposed to in childhood but never learned to full competence because of the switch to another language. The course will identify critical linguistic generalizations applying to heritage languages. We will test the universal principles of language structure that are expected to stay unchanged in any language. The students will also learn crucial methodologies and tools for investigating heritage languages and their speakers in an experimental setting. Class discussions will reflect the current social and political discourse surrounding heritage populations. The work done in this class will lead to the development of experimental methodologies and tools for studying and testing heritage languages in the classroom.