Undergraduate Program

This course introduces students to the study of the structure of human language. We will cover the six core areas of linguistic investigation: Phonetics (articulation, acoustics, and perception of speech sounds), Phonology (sound patterns), Morphology (internal structure of words and their organization in the mental lexicon), Syntax (internal structure of phrases and sentences), Semantics (word and sentence meaning), and Pragmatics (language use in context). The course focuses on developing skills in the areas of linguistic data analysis and interpretation of linguistic data in ways that aim to address theoretical and empirical issues in the study of language. In addition to the lecture students will need to register for a peer-led workshop.

The goal of this course is to provide a background for understanding the principles that underlie the structure of sound systems in human languages. Starting with the notion phoneme, the course focuses on acoustic and articulatory phonetics, as a basis for understanding phonological processes and change in linguistic sound forms. Students will acquire skills in the production, recognition, and transcription of sounds in various languages of the world. The course will serve as a foundation for work in language documentation, sociolinguistics and sociophonetics, morphology. This course is meant for linguistics majors and non-majors alike. In addition to the lecture students will need to register for a peer-led workshop.

Syntax is the system of rules that we subconsciously follow when we construct sentences. The course is designed to introduce the grammatical principles that guide the building of structures. The students will acquire and apply the tools necessary for linguistic analysis of phrases and sentences. Built on data puzzles from English and some lesser studied non-Indo European languages, the students will gain insights into state of the art syntactic theory and lingering questions.

This course introduces students to the basics of the analysis of meaning in natural language. The first section focuses on devices that motivate certain forms to take on the meanings they have. The second section of the course moves on to discuss how meanings combine to form meanings for larger units—how words and phrases combine to form sentences meanings. Using logical notation we illustrate the formal analysis of natural language meaning in terms of truth-conditions. We will discuss the basics of set theory, and investigate how meanings represented in these terms correlate with the syntactic and lexical structures of sentences of natural language. This course counts towards satisfying the core course requirement for majors. Students must also register for a workshop.

The Department of Linguistics offers both technical courses in formal linguistics (200+ level) and courses that do not require technical background in linguistics and address issues in human society from a linguist's perspective (100 level). View our course catalog for a full overview of all our courses.

The Natural Language cluster gives students an overview of the nature of human language.

The Syntax cluster considers in depth how sentences are formed from words, and the principles that govern them.

The Language and Meaning cluster focuses on the semantics and pragmatics of natural language, and how linguistic forms and their usages give rise to meanings.

The Language Structure cluster introduces students to the techniques for investigating the structures of a wide variety of languages.

The Language in Society cluster considers the impact of how we talk about things in our daily lives, and how it affects society as a whole.