Linguistics Course Catalog

This course introduces how language is used and perceived to mark social  characteristics of an individual or group of individuals. We will examine how social identity is constructed linguistically, which linguistic cues are used consciously to denote different social identities, and how most linguistic cues delineating social groups are below conscious awareness. Topics include: prescriptive and descriptive perspectives of language, dialects, accents, language standardization, language and dialect contact, and linguistic profiling.

Offering Frequency: Spring

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): None

This course investigates the relationship between language and culture at the interface of linguistics and anthropology. It examines the ways in which language reflects the perception of the world, ways of life and beliefs of its speakers, creates rituals and maintains social ties, and is used by people of different ages, genders, social classes, and ethnicities. We will discuss hypotheses that try to explain the nature of relationship between language and culture and then turn to a wide variety of topics which are relevant for both linguists and anthropologists. These include, for instance, kinship systems, language of perception (e.g. colors, spatial relations), politeness across languages and cultures, and writing systems.

Offering Frequency: Fall

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): None

Humans have thrived in diverse, often harsh environments all over the earth for many millennia by passing on important bodies of knowledge of landscape and climate across many generations. How does this work? In this course we will study the deep relationship between people, their environment and languages they speak through the ways they use their languages to encode their knowledge of the landscapes they survive in. We’ll cover a variety of topics, related to the interests of students, including place names and toponyms, what names like 'Boston Massachusetts', 'Nine Pipe Montana', tells us about the history of immigration in the US. Landscape terms, if you have lived for millennium in a flat, treeless landscape, do you have a word for mountain or tree? How does the way we talk about water influence the way we understand what it is. We’ll discuss the role of memory in oral histories and the ways knowledge is linked to landscape. We'll discuss oral maps, like the Australian Songlines which people use to cross a vast waterless desert, and the oral maps of the Athabaskan people who traveled across huge expanses of the inhospitable boreal forests of northern North America. The role of oral knowledge in indigenous land claim cases, including issues such as giving legal personhood to natural phenomena like rivers. The nature of the strong bonds that humans have to the places they belong to. We'll discuss a range of topics related to how language shapes landscape, determining international boundaries, landownership, zoning laws and the role of mapping in disputes, the ways that contemporary culture code knowledge of landscape and climate.

Offering Frequency: Every other year

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): None

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.

Offering Frequency: Every semester

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): None

This course looks at key ideas in linguistics, starting in Babylon and Ancient China and working towards the study of meaning in modern linguistic theory and philosophy of language. Among the topics we will look at are: writing and its influence on grammatical traditions; the advent of historical linguistics, linguistic phylogeny, and the comparative method; European structuralism; American structuralism; variation within and across languages; the rise of generative grammar; Chomsky's philosophy of linguistics, including competence and I-language; literal meaning and beyond. Students will be expected to read a selection of primary literature and participate actively in class discussion. The course will be assessed by essays (essay questions and reading lists for each essay to be provided).

Offering Frequency: Every other year

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110 and LING 210(W) or LING 220

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

This course is designed to give an introduction to the principles of linguistic variation and change, and to examine their practical application in the interdisciplinary subfields of historical linguistics and historical sociolinguistics. Topics covered include diachrony and synchrony, genetic relations, the comparative method and language classification, sound change, morphological, syntactic and semantic change, borrowing, types of language contact, areal linguistics, and linguistic variation and social stratification.

Offering Frequency: Every other year

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

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.

Offering Frequency: Fall

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

This course provides an introduction to probability and statistics for linguistics, serving as an essential foundation for linguistics students who aim to analyze experimental and corpus linguistic data. Topics include (i) elementary probability theory; (ii) elementary descriptive and inferential statistics; (iii) elementary machine learning concepts; and (iv) fixed and mixed effects models. Concepts are explored through linguistic case studies, including the analysis of formally collected judgment data, reaction times, and acoustic measurements.

Offering Frequency: Fall

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

About 2,000 of the world’s 7,000 languages are spoken in Africa. The diversity that characterizes these languages is exceptional, but little known to non-specialists. In this course, we will learn about the languages of Africa: the diversity of their linguistic structures (including famous features that are found nowhere else, e.g. click consonants), their history and the history of their speakers (from ca 10,000 BP to the (post-) colonial period), and their cultural contexts, among other topics. We will explore the wealth and diversity of African cultures through the lens of language. This course also incorporates a variety of other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, history, archaeology, human genetics, as well as the arts, to bring to light the variety of institutions, norms, and social practices produced by African societies which have historically been excluded from dominant cultural narratives. The focus will be on the role played by language in these institutions, norms and practices, and their representation.

Offering Frequency: Fall

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): None

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

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.

Offering Frequency: Spring

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

This course covers foundational concepts in computational linguistics and is designed for students with a strong background in formal linguistic methods but only rudimentary programming experience. Major focus is placed on the use of formal languages as a tool for understanding natural language as well as on developing students' ability to implement foundational algorithms pertaining to those formal languages. Topics include basic formal language theory, finite state phonological and morphological parsing, and syntactic parsing for context free grammars and mildly context sensitive formalisms. Students who have taken the CSC17X series should consult with the instructor prior to enrollment, since there is overlap with a subset of the technical material covered in those courses. Conversely, while it is possible to enter this course with no programming experience and do well, students new to programming may wish to take CSC161 or to attend a CIRC programming bootcamp prior to taking this course.

Offering Frequency: Spring

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

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. Students of graduate standing or those with strong formal backgrounds may consider starting with LING 265/465 instead, for which this course is ordinarily a prerequisite. This course counts towards satisfying the core course requirement for majors. Students must also register for a workshop.

Offering Frequency: Fall

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

The course examines the structure and definition of the linguistic unit 'word'' its typology and the relationship of the morphological component to other levels in the grammar. The course includes an introduction to analytical techniques with emphasis placed on an examination of data from a range of languages. The building blocks of words will be analyzed and topics such as affixation, reduplication and inflectional and derivational morphology will be covered. We will examine the properties of words and how they fit into the larger structure of linguistic knowledge, including the relationship between words and syntactic structure (ex., phrases and sentences) and the relationship between words and phonological structure (ex., phonological rules and prosodic structure).

Offering Frequency: Fall

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

This course is intended to provide participants with an overview of research in an area of phonetics and phonology. Issues vary from term to term but may cover areas in segmental, metrical and intonational phonology and the phonology/phonetics interface.

Offering Frequency: Spring

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110 and LING 210(W)

Graduate Prerequisite(s): LING 410

In this course we investigate the study of word-meaning in current linguistics and cognitive science. We examine the meanings of lexical items such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, and prepositions, and also other categories of words, including various function words and discourse particles. We examine theories of word-meaning, and examine how words and vocabulary may vary between languages.

Offering Frequency: Every other year

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110, LING 210(W), LING 220, and LING 225

Graduate Prerequisite(s): LING 410, LING 420, or LING 425

Phonology is the study of the patterns and systems of sounds in human language. This course introduces the core concepts, analytical tools, and major frameworks in phonological analysis, building on the articulatory and acoustic foundations of phonetics learned in LING 210(W)/410. Our main goals are to develop descriptive and analytical skills in phonology through problem solving and to become familiar with phonological phenomena that occur in the languages of the world. You will become familiar with phonological concepts such as phoneme and allophone, underlying and surface representations, distinctive features, contrast, alternation, neutralization, the syllable and mora, and so forth. You will also learn about the selection of underlying representations, rule notation and ordering, and making informed decisions when multiple analyses are viable. A brief overview of optimality theory will be provided at the end of the semester, as part of a discussion about theory-building in phonology. We will discuss the external motivations for phonological grammar, how to lay out the predictions of a theoretical proposal, and how these predictions can potentially be tested.

Offering Frequency: Every other year

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110 and LING 210(W)

Graduate Prerequisite(s): LING 410

This course offers an overview of the study of language variation and change. We will examine some of the ways that spoken language varies according to the social characteristics and social motivations of its speakers. Methods for quantitative analysis of linguistic variation will be introduced.

Offering Frequency: Every other year

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

This course addresses linguistic research questions through data science techniques. The course will focus on developing skills to (i) acquire and process a variety of language data, from using established corpora to capturing data in the wild, and (ii) to investigate language use, particularly syntactic and semantic phenomena, through descriptive and inferential statistical techniques. A significant part of the course will be devoted to hands-on projects and will include developing familiarity with using the programming languages Python and R to acquire and explore linguistic data. Familiarity with statistics and/or computational linguistics is advantageous, but not necessary.

Offering Frequency: Spring

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): None

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

In this course, you will learn about existing theories of syntactic phenomena, how to critically evaluate them, and how to make your own proposal within a given framework. This work will develop both your analytical skills and your critical thinking about theories. Topics include argument structure, case, agreement, raising and control, and constraints on movement. Additional goals of this course are: (i) to practice reading primary syntactic literature and (ii) to develop a research project in syntax.

Offering Frequency: Fall

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110 and LING 220

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

This syntactic theory course examines syntactic phenomena from the perspective of phrase structure and lexicalist grammar as opposed to transformational grammar. The course will examine and develop phrase structure grammar (specifically Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar) approaches to standard syntactic problems, contrasting them where appropriate with transformational approaches. No background in non-transformational approaches will be assumed. This course can be taken as LIN 261 or as LIN 461 and is meant for linguistics majors and non-majors alike.

Offering Frequency: Every other year

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110 and LING 220

Graduate Prerequisite(s): LING 420

This course is an in-depth introduction to the formal analysis of natural language meaning, employing techniques that have been developed in language and formal philosophy over the last century. Issues include intensionality, quantification, tense, presupposition, plurality, the analysis of discourse, and other current issues. Familiarity with syntax, logic, and/or computation are helpful.

Offering Frequency: Spring

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): Instructor Permission

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

Within theoretical linguistics, pragmatics is (broadly speaking) the study of how language users convey meaning. This course covers three general areas: (1) How meaning carried by linguistic elements (such as sentences) interacts with meaning that arises from inferences about speakers intentions; (2) Ways of characterizing meaning, especially with respect to linguistic elements not easily handled in traditional semantic (i.e., truth-conditional) terms; (3) The role of context in determining meaning. Topics to be discussed include the relation between semantics and pragmatics, representations of context, truth-conditional and other types of meaning, presupposition; implicature and Grices Cooperative Principle.

Offering Frequency: Spring

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): None

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

This course covers topics at the interface of syntax and semantics. No specific syntax or semantics background is required, though the equivalent of LIN 220 is recommended.

Offering Frequency: Every other year

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): None

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

This course is a hands-on exploration of recent advances in computational models of meaning. The first part of the course will focus on implementing traditional rule-based compositional semantics in the functional programming language Haskell. We will construct a sophisticated model of formal semantics, culminating in examining the use of monads to model types of natural language meaning phenomena. The second part of the course explores distributional semantic models and their implementation, where lexical meaning is defined in terms of lexical co-occurrence, estimating meaning from large-scale corpus resources.

Offering Frequency: On occassion

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): None

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

This class is addressed to anyone interested in fieldwork involving data collection of spoken language, including for instance linguists, anthropologists, or historians. Languages and cultures are currently disappearing on an unprecedented level due to the effects of globalization and displacement of people. Minority groups are often the most affected. As languages and cultures die, we lose entire knowledge systems and communities an integral part of their identity. This class introduces you to major techniques and tools of collecting and curating language data, using it for your research purposes, and making it useful to speech communities and other scholars. We will investigate the importance of language as a social convention from an interdisciplinary perspective, including, e.g., issues in intercultural research and ethics in fieldwork. Students will design their own projects, depending on their personal interests, and receive hands-on training in audio and video recording, time-aligned annotations, data management, and archiving.

Offering Frequency: Fall

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

The application of neural network methods - under the name Deep Learning - has led to breakthroughs in a wide range of fields, including in building language technologies (e.g. for search, translation, text input prediction). This course will provide a hands-on introduction to the use of deep learning methods for processing natural language. Methods to be covered include static word embeddings, feed-forward networks for text, recurrent neural networks, transformers, pre-training and transfer learning, with applications including sentiment analysis, translation, generation, and testing Linguistic theory.

Offering Frequency: Fall

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): None

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

This course covers topics in sociolinguistics. In different semesters this may include, for example, advanced topics in language variation and change, socio-phonetics, language contact, or language shift and maintenance. Some previous experience in linguistics is recommended, such as the equivalent of either LING 210/410 or LING 220/420.

Offering Frequency: Every other year

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110 and LING 210(W) or LING 220

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

This is a hands-on class which allows you to work with a language consultant with the goal of writing a grammar sketch or a short research paper. At the end of this course, you will have acquired methods and techniques to describe a language not known to you previously. This includes recording and collection of data, data processing and analysis. The class is an opportunity to apply the knowledge of linguistic theory that you acquired during your major in linguistic research on an unfamiliar language. Another focus of this course is training in grammar writing skills. Ultimately, this course provides you with a solid basis to do fieldwork for language description and linguistic research in your own in the future.

Offering Frequency: Spring

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 110, LING 210(W), LING 220, and LING 225

This class is similar to LING 389: Students will learn how to organize a fieldwork project by working with a native speaker. They will systematically prepare elicitation sessions, organize their data, and learn how to write up short sketches of their findings. The final project is a chapter of a joint sketch grammar of the language, including annotated natural text. In contrast to the senior seminar, however, this course is designed for two terms, continuing in the fall term. Having a background in language documentation and data processing techniques, students in this class will focus more on collecting and annotating natural texts (stories, dialogues, experimental data) which is adding a documentary angle.

Offering Frequency: As needed

Graduate Prerequisite(s): Instructor Permission

This course is intended to help graduate students in linguistics design and plan for independent research. Topics will include developing a research question, conducting a literature review, and designing a research plan. As necessary, we will also work on “research management,” or everything that researchers need to do alongside producing intellectual content, including presentation skills (different types of presentation), data collection techniques, writing an IRB proposal, managing research timelines, securing research funds, developing necessary software skills, maintaining a presence in the field, conducting a job search, and others. A secondary goal of the course is to provide an opportunity for graduate advising. Students may bring questions or concerns for discussion.

Offering Frequency: Spring

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

This graduate course expands upon and deepens the analyses of cross-linguistic syntactic phenomena introduced in LING 460 with the goal of learning to use and develop syntactic theory as a framework for exploring, understanding and explaining cross-linguistic as well as language-specific syntactic patterns. Participants will engage in class discussion of primary syntactic literature and develop a research project to be presented to the class and submitted at the end of the term. Topics include A vs. A-bar phenomena, constraints on A-bar movement, successive cyclicity, wh-in-situ, relative clauses, tough constructions, linearization, ATB movement and multi-dominance, control, ellipsis and binding.

Offering Frequency: Spring

Graduate Prerequisite(s): LING 460

This course is an overview of advanced topics in morphology. The course first introduces students to the landscape of possible morphological theories and what different implications they hold for linguistic theory more broadly, since morphology interfaces with syntax, phonology, and semantics. The interface with syntax is explored in light of possible distinctions between word and morpheme and between inflectional and derivational morphology. The course explores modern perspectives on major types of morphological systems, such as fusional morphology, agglutinative morphology, templatic morphology, and polysynthesis. The course examines various theoretical and empirical aspects of morphology from topics such as inflection vs. derivation, concord vs. agreement, the individuation of roots, blocking, polysemy, suppletion, syncretism, and secondary or multiple exponence.

Offering Frequency: Every other year

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): Instructor Permission

Graduate Prerequisite(s): None

The goal of LING 527 is to acquire a basic understanding of fundamental components of the architecture of spoken language characterized as the prosodic hierarchy. the interaction of related suprasegmental phenomena such as stress, accent, tone, meter and intonation, and the various ways they may manifest and interact with each other. Crosslinguistic work on prosody is critical because prosody in fieldwork is underdocumented. Different languages use these components to produce very distinct types of often mixed systems that shed light on the organization of spoken language and the grammar. The course will consist of readings of primary materials, it will include assignments, some data collection and learning measurement techniques to test ideas and theories, with a final project on an aspect of the prosody of a language. The first 1/3 of the course will concern the Prosodic Hierarchy: what it is, what the hierarchical levels represent, how they are manifested, and the theories use to represent and investigate them. The rest of the seminar will consist of articles and readings on topics related to the study of a variety of prosodic phenomena, including mixed systems and interactions of tone w meter, and tone and accent systems and the identification of boundaries in inflectional systems. We will discuss ideas on how to collect prosodic data with and without using elicitation materials.

Offering Frequency: On occassion

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 210(W)

Graduate Prerequisite(s): LING 410

This course covers advanced topics in phonetics and phonology.

Offering Frequency: On occassion

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): LING 210(W)

Graduate Prerequisite(s): LING 410

No description available.

Offering Frequency: On occassion

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): Instructor Permission

Graduate Prerequisite(s): LING 410, LING 427, and LING 437

The seminar’s overarching theme is syntactic locality. In narrow syntax, two types of locality have long been recognized: (a) boundary domains and (b) relativized minimality. The former refers to the existence of categories (today known as phases) that are impenetrable for syntactic operations. The latter concerns competition among potential targets of operations, requiring that the closest suitable candidate is selected for the operation.

The seminar aims to provide a comprehensive overview of theoretical proposals addressing both types of locality, highlighting key empirical findings that have reshaped these theories over time. Through an exploration of foundational and recent literature, students will be equipped to conduct original research on the topic.

Key questions we will explore in the seminar:

• Are both CPs and vPs phases?

  • If so, how can we explain the relative transparency of vP?

  • If not, how do we account for successive cyclic movement through vP?

• Do all operations—A-movement, A-bar movement, φ-agreement, case assignment, etc.—observe the same locality domains?

• How do cross-clausal relations, such as hyperraising, align with the CP phase hypothesis?

• Is A-movement genuinely more local than A-bar movement?

• What is the locality of φ-agreement?

• What is the locality of case assignment?

• How can we reconcile Relativized Minimality with inversion constructions, whose existence seems to directly contradict it?

• How do we reconcile Relativized Minimality with defective intervention, such as that caused by dative subjects in Icelandic?

Through addressing these questions, the seminar will provide a structured path for students to critically engage with the intricate dynamics of syntactic locality.

Offering Frequency: On occassion

Undergraduate Prerequisite(s): Instructor Permission

Graduate Prerequisite(s): LING 420 and LING 460

This is a hands-on, practical course preparing students to produce linguistic research based on data collected through elicitation. To achieve this, students will work with a speaker of an unfamiliar language and develop a research project based on the data they collect. The practical goals include: (i) obtaining familiarity with devising and refining elicitation strategies; (ii) analyzing data from an unfamiliar language; and (iii) receiving training in writing a grammatical description with appropriate terminology.

Offering Frequency: Every other year

Graduate Prerequisite(s): Two of LING 405, LING 410, LING 420, LING 425, LING 426, and LING 440