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 language acquisition, bilingualism, neurolinguistics, historical linguistics and computational linguistics.

As educated users of language, many of us have strong feelings about it, such as how we should use it ("That isn't what 'literally' means!") and why. Which of these feelings are valid and which are closer to folklore? In this class, we investigate many preconceptions about language, objectively explore their validity as myth or fact, and make conclusions about how human languages can(not) be described. Topics may include whether: women talk more than men, children learn languages better than adults, legalese is more precise, dolphins use language, all languages/dialects are equally sophisticated, and bilingualism makes you smarter.

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 delves into the internal composition of words (morphology) across languages. What is a word? What can be inside of a word? Do all languages build words in the same way(s), with the same sorts of ingredients? How similar is word-building to sentence-building? We will engage deeply with both the empirical and theoretical side of this topic, exploring not just morphology, but also its interactions with phonology (sound systems) and syntax (sentence structure). This class will be highly interactive and hands-on, and students will develop tools of analysis and argumentation that are applicable in all areas of linguistics and beyond.

This course explores intonation (the melodic patterns of sentences), addressing questions like: What does punctuation (e.g., a comma) sound like? How can we measure intonation, acoustically? How is intonation different from "tone" in languages like Mandarin? How do we transcribe intonation and analyze it? Students learn how to use laboratory methods and computer software to study intonation in spoken languages. (We focus on Mainstream American English but study other languages/dialects as well.) We also examine how intonational features relate to other aspects of language, such as sentence structure, linguistic meaning, and social context.

Linguists face the dual challenge of trying to understand language as a set of behaviors and as systems of knowledge, and as such, linguists often base their descriptions and analyses on some combination of naturalistic observation and introspection. Recently, various experimental methods are being employed to more rigorously test the accuracy of linguistic data and/or gather novel sorts of data. We will engage hands-on with some of these techniques, and students will learn about core aspects of experimental design, details of influential paradigms that have been used with language, and the types of conclusions that can be drawn from them.

This course is a hands-on exploration of language typology. Each student will work with a different endangered language to help us, as a class, answer typological questions across various domains of language (sounds, words, sentences, etc.). Along what lines do languages vary? How much can languages differ from each other? Are any linguistic properties shared across all human languages, and if so, how do we explain them? How do signed languages fit into this picture, and what's all that buzz about Pirahã? Through answering these questions, we will build up and engage with various models and theories of language variation.

This course will familiarize concentrators with research questions and practices in various subfields of linguistics, common linguistics research methodologies (including experimental, fieldwork, text-based, and ethnographic), and writing conventions specific to linguistics. Throughout, students will connect with on-campus resources and explore research questions of their own choosing, supported by readings from linguistics textbooks and handbooks. The goal of this course is to prepare concentrators for success in their junior and senior independent work.

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.

This course will provide an introduction to the study of South Asian languages in relation to culture (and history, society and politics), addressing topics such as orality and writing systems, multilingualism and polyglossia, literary cultures, cosmopolitan and vernacular language politics, and their relationship to social identity in historical and contemporary perspective.

This course explores the vast linguistic diversity of the Americas: native languages, pidgins, creoles, mixed languages, and other languages in North, Central, and South America, including the Caribbean. We will examine historical and current issues of multilingualism to understand the relationship between language, identity, and social mobility. We will discuss how languages played a central role in colonization and nation-building processes, and how language policies contribute to linguistic loss and revitalization. This course has no prerequisites and is intended for students interested in learning more about languages in the Americas.