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 may include language acquisition, language and the brain, and language change.

This course offers intensive practice in American Sign Langauge (ASL) through learning specialized vocabulary, analyzing grammar, developing ASL-English translation skills, and discussing ASL literary works and Deaf culture.

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 rights, bioethics, and education. No American Sign Language knowledge required.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 offers an intensive study of phonological theory and analysis, following the introduction offered in LIN 301. The course will explore the typology of phonological properties and processes (assimilation and dissimilation, vowel and consonant harmony, tonal processes, syllable structure, stress), with examples from geographically, typologically, and genetically diverse languages. The focus will be both on description and theory.

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. Techniques for processing human languages (morphological analysis, tagging, syntactic and semantic parsing, and language generation) will be discussed with hands-on, in-class exercises. Linguistic variation and its impact on computational models will be presented. Term projects will involve implementing speech/text translation components, identifying their limitations and suggesting improvements or any topic of relevance to language processing.