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.

This course explores the history, culture, and language of the Deaf in the United States. The first part of the course focuses on the history of Deaf people in the United States. The second part discusses various aspects of Deaf culture: language, literature, art, politics, etc. The third part critically examines different issues facing Deaf people here in the United States and around the world. These issues include audism, linguicism, ableism, intersectionality, disability justice, bioethics, and education. No American Sign Language knowledge required.

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.

This course is an introduction to the science of speech sounds (phonetics) and sound systems (phonology). Students will 1) learn how sounds from a wide variety of languages are produced, and learn to produce and transcribe them; 2) understand and analyze the acoustic properties of speech sounds using (free) software; 3) understand the unconscious knowledge speakers have of the rules and constraints that govern their native language's sound system; 4) extract phonological generalizations from phonetic data from various languages; 5) learn about the similarities and differences between the sound systems of the world's languages.

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 explores how the sounds, words, and grammar of languages change through time, and how to reconstruct languages of the past. There is a particular emphasis on applying the comparative method and principles of internal reconstruction, which allow us to uncover regular changes in a language's history, determine which languages developed from a common source, and reconstruct that original language. Other topics include how to propose language family trees (including recent computational models), and how unrelated languages influence each other. Strong focus on analyzing language data from many different parts of the world.

When examining the sounds of language, consonants and vowels receive the bulk of the attention. However, above these segments lives a parallel world called 'spoken language prosody'. Such phenomena include stress, rhythm, intonation, tone, phrasing, and more. In this course, you will be trained in how to hear contrasts in prosody, learn how to transcribe these contrasts, learn how to dissect the inner components using the latest linguistic phonetics software, and analyze these contrasts within a language's grammar. This course will involve a mix of lectures, intensive in-class and at-home problem sets, and your own data collection.

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 majors 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 majors for success in their junior and senior independent work.

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.

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 policies contribute to language loss and reclamation. Students will work with members of the Munsee Delaware Nation to develop community relationships and collaborate in a small project.