This course provides a hands-on introduction to the methods and theories of linguistic anthropology, a sub-field devoted to the study of language and interaction in sociocultural and political processes. We will consider language as more than a neutral conduit for exchanging information or expressing ideas. Through readings and data gathering and analysis exercises, we will explore language as a resource and a factor that shapes and is shaped by our experiences, identities, relationships with and perception of the world and the people around us. Major themes include race, citizenship, gender, disability, and interpretation and power.

This course is an introduction to the scientific analysis of the structure and uses of language. Core areas covered include phonetics and phonology, morphology, the lexicon, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, with data from a wide range of languages. Additional topics include sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and language acquisition.

This course introduces DEAF+WORLD, a world where people speak with their hands and hear with their eyes. It is for students who are interested in learning basic American Sign Language (ASL). Students will acquire basic vocabulary and grammar through interactive activities in order to develop conversational skills in ASL. Students also will practice using body language to communicate in order to effectively communicate with Deaf people while having minimal signing skills. In addition, the basics of Deaf culture and Deaf American history will be discussed.

The invention of writing was a major breakthrough in human history since it allowed us to record and convey information beyond our immediate surroundings. This course zooms in on the history and linguistics of writing/reading. The first half of the course discusses the origins and typology of writing systems, as well as the role of phonology, morphology, and other levels of linguistic structure in their design. In the second half, we focus on psycholinguistic aspects of writing/reading, namely, how graphic representations map onto mental representations of words, opening a window into the ways adults read across languages and writing systems.

This course investigates language in its social, cultural, political, and historical contexts. Does your native language influence your perception, your behavior, and your culture? How does your identity influence properties of your language? What happens when unrelated languages come into contact for prolonged periods? How are new languages born? Why isn't English the official language of the United States, and should it be? We will explore these questions (and more) by engaging with the often contradictory opinions of specialists and the public, as well as with the empirical realities behind these different language situations.

About 2000 of the world's 6000 to 7000 languages are spoken in Africa. The diversity that characterizes these languages is exceptional, but very little is 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. This course has no prerequisites, and is open to anyone with an interest in African languages or the African continent.

Syntax is the aspect of human language involved in building phrases out of words. How do words combine - like beads on a string? Are words the smallest building blocks of phrases? How can we make predictions about what is possible and impossible in these structures? This course aims to answer these questions while focusing on the methods linguists use to analyze natural language expressions. Explorations of some universal properties of language structures, as well as the ways in which those structures can vary. Strong emphasis on building and testing hypotheses on the basis of both language data and foundational principles of the field.

This course is concerned with linguistic meaning, i.e., the way speakers of a language associate interpretations to expressions in that language. After defining basic semantic relations among sentences, we go on to investigate the way the meaning of sentences is constructed based on the meanings of their parts. We consider a range of linguistic phenomena to incrementally build up our framework, including brief excursions into pragmatics and psycholinguistics. To help us be precise we will use the tools of Propositional and Predicate Logic as well as lambda calculus.

The course covers the linguistic, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, and sociolinguistic aspects of bilingualism. We examine language acquisition in monolingual and bilingual children, the notion of "critical age" for language acquisition, definitions and measurements of bilingualism, and the verbal behavior of bilinguals such as code-switching. We consider the effects of bilingualism on other cognitive domains, including memory, and examine neurolinguistic evidence comparing the brains of monolinguals and bilinguals. Societal and governmental attitudes toward bilingualism in countries like India and the U.S. are contrasted.

This course will expand your knowledge of linguistic phenomena and linguistic theory through the lens of Lithuanian, an understudied Baltic language. Our focus will be on morphological and syntactic phenomena, covering topics such as compounding, gender features, affixation, passive vs. impersonal constructions, and case. Throughout the course, we will address historical and sociolinguistic factors that have influenced the linguistic structure of Lithuanian, its dialects, and other Baltic languages like Latvian and Latgalian. We will also draw typological connections between Baltic and other language families, especially Slavic and Germanic.

This course provides a thorough intro to the principles and practice of linguistic fieldwork. Students will be trained in methods of language description and analysis based on data provided by a native speaker of an unfamiliar language. A wide range of topics will be covered, from data collection techniques to the theoretically informed analysis of the collected data, and all major subfields of linguistics will be involved. Course is designed for students interested in documentary/descriptive linguistic work and those interested in incorporating linguistics data into research in theoretical linguistics.

This course builds on the foundation provided by LIN 306 to delve much more deeply into the subfield of morphology. We will compare competing morphological theories, question the basic primitives of morphology (morphemes, words, structure), and contend with challenging data from a wide variety of languages. At least one empirical phenomenon will be explored at length during the semester, e.g., compounding, infixation, reduplication, or mobile affixation. Throughout the course, students will engage directly with advanced scholarship on morphology.

We can share thoughts through language. But how do we do so effortlessly? Language is riddled with context-sensitivity. Further, what we communicate often goes beyond what's literally said. We can implicate, insinuate or hint, and speak figuratively, e.g. through irony, humor, or metaphor. We can communicate with others whether their interests and goals align with our own or not. We can successfully use words even when ignorant of what they denote. With such diversity, how is communicative success possible? We will focus on this and related questions through the lens of recent literature in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science.

The cognitive processes underlying the use and understanding of language, and in learning to speak. Topics include speech production and perception, grammar and meaning, knowledge and words, and pragmatic aspects of language.

Offered as an overview of the social, cultural, and political aspects that forge linguistic variation in the Spanish-speaking world, students discuss issues of power, identity, globalization, policymaking, social status, gender, and ideology to understand cases of linguistic variation and change. Students will recognize particular features distinguishing one dialect from another, while gaining knowledge of the development of these differences. This course will enrich a student's view of Spanish as a social construct, either as a native/heritage speaker or as a Spanish learner, and will allow students to develop their analytical skills.

This course will provide an in-depth study of Machine Translation paradigms used in state-of-the-art speech-to-speech and text-based MT systems, from computational and linguistic perspectives. We will discuss techniques for processing human languages (morphological analysis, tagging, syntactic and semantic parsing, and language generation) with hands-on, in-class exercises. Linguistic variation and its impact on computational models will be presented. Term projects will involve implementing components of speech/text technologies, identifying their limitations, and suggesting improvements, or any topic relevant to language processing.