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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
Students are introduced to the study of comparative (Proto-)Indo-European syntax. Methods of reconstructing a protosyntax are presented and compared. The course deals with recent explanations concerning the origin and development of a number of parts of speech, including adverbs and prepositions, and syntactic constructions, including absolute, relative, and periphrastic verbal constructions (for example, the passive) in Proto-Indo-European and its descendant languages. Reanalysis and grammaticalization are addressed in some detail. Questions concerning the motivation of innovations and their implications for the overall evolution of language are discussed.
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4.00 Credits
Hungarian is known as a language that wears its semantics on its syntactic sleeve. Word order transparently identifies the topic and the focus of the sentence and disambiguates the scopes of operators such as "always," "not," and "everyone." This course studies Hungarian from the perspective of theoretical linguistics and asks what this language tells us about how the syntax/semantics interface works in universal grammar. It reviews the fundamentals of Hungarian morphology and syntax and discusses current literature. Not a language course.
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4.00 Credits
Examines the pidginized and creolized languages of the world. Addresses three central questions: (1) how pidgins/creoles (P/Cs) come into being, (2) why P/Cs have the properties they do, and (3) why P/Cs-regardless of the circumstances of Department of Linguistics their genesis-share so many features. Examines P/Cs vis-Ã -vis other types of languages, considers the linguistic and social factors that contribute to the genesis of individual P/Cs, and investigates the linguistic characteristics of P/Cs. Geographic focus is on the Atlantic (creoles from the Caribbean and pidgins from West Africa), but pidgins/creoles from the Pacific are also discussed.
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4.00 Credits
Focuses on the compositional semantics of sentences. Introduces set theory, propositional logic, and predicate logic as tools and goes on to investigate the empirical linguistic issues of presuppositions, quantification, scope, and polarity. Points out parallelisms between the nominal and the verbal domains.
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4.00 Credits
Living languages in use by a community of speakers are diverse and dynamic. Individuals and groups of speakers differentiate and identify themselves by the way they use language, people can adapt their speech to different listeners in social settings, and speakers develop their linguistic capabilities as they grow older. The language as a whole changes across time. This course examines language not from the standpoint of abstract structural description but from the perspective of how it is actively used in a speech community. We consider theoretical issues, such as how to model diversity in language use, and methodological issues, such as how to study language change while it is under way. We study appropriate quantitative methods for investigating variation across linguistic contexts, speakers, settings, and time. This course has a strong practical focus; students learn how to plan and conduct their own research on language use.
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4.00 Credits
Introduces the syntax of Romance languages, primarily French, Italian, and Spanish, but also various Romance dialects. Considers what they have in common with each other (and with English) and how best to characterize the ways in which they differ from each other (and from English).
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4.00 Credits
What are the brain bases of our ability to speak and understand language? Are some parts of the brain dedicated to language? What is it like to lose language? Provides a state-of-the-art survey of the cognitive neuroscience of language, a rapidly developing multidisciplinary field at the intersection of linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. Lectures cover all aspects of language processing in the healthy brain, from early sensory perception to sentence-level semantic interpretation, as well as a range of neurological and development language disorders, including aphasias, dyslexia, and genetic language impairment.
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4.00 Credits
A hands-on approach to learning linguistics. Every year, a different language is chosen to investigate. Students interview a native speaker of an unfamiliar language, usually a nonlinguist, to study all aspects of the language's grammar: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics. They learn to evaluate and organize real, nonidealized linguistic data and to formulate generalizations that then serve as the basis for a research proposal. A unique opportunity to obtain a rich and complete set of data on a new topic of theoretical interest in any field of linguistics.
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4.00 Credits
How do human perception, cognition, language, and communication relate to the abilities of animals, fossil records, anthropological and archaeological research, cave painting, and physiology? We broadly try to answer the following: What is a likely scenario for human evolution from animal origins? We argue (with Chomsky, Darwin, D'Arcy, Thompson, Turing, Lorenz, Gould) that evolution proceeds in large jumps (saltations) and that slow, gradual evolution via natural selection (per Pinker, Hauser, Fitch, Lieberman) cannot account for human cognitive evolution. Readings focus on original works by Darwin, Wallace, D'Arcy, Thompson, Freud, Chomsky, Galileo, and Pinker and include studies by zoologists, linguists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and psychologists.
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4.00 Credits
African American English is a distinct dialect of American English that has influenced U.S. and Department of Linguistics world cultures. Yet, from an educational perspective, its speakers have faced well-documented educational challenges. Explores contemporary, social, linguistic, and educational issues that arise for speakers of African American English in the United States. Topics covered include a history of African American language behavior, politics, and policies around the language, teacher education, language attitudes, culture and curriculum, and controversies about African American English in the schools. Also considers how educational issues surrounding African American English compare to other languages and dialects of English. Students have an opportunity to conduct original research.
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