Linguistics Course Descriptions
Linguistics 296
- Psychology of Language Acquisition
See Psychology 296 for description.
Linguistics 311
- General Linguistics
Full course for one semester. Intended to give a broad introduction
to linguistics. The course provides sufficient background in the
various aspects of the discipline to allow students to pursue more
specialized courses and to read independently in the field. The
course employs readings and empirical problems in a wide range of
the world's languages. Topics introduced include the nature of
language and the aims of linguistic description; historical
linguistics; phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax;
linguistic semantics; and selected issues in pragmatics, language
variation and change, and socio- and psycho-linguistics. This
course is open to first-year students with consent of the
instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as Anthropology 311.
Linguistics 312
- Advanced Linguistics
Full course for one semester. An opportunity to pursue intensive
readings in specialized topics in linguistics. The focus of the
course shifts from analytic procedures and basic concepts developed
in Anthropology 311 to individual research and theoretical problems
in linguistics. The topic for 2005-06 will be language and space.
May be repeated for credit with consent of the instructor.
Prerequisite: Anthropology 311 or Linguistics 311 or equivalent.
Conference-seminar. Cross-listed as Anthropology 312.
Linguistics 313
- Language in Society
Full course for one semester. The course will introduce the study
of language, both spoken and written, as a central element in the
construction of social life. On the one hand, society occasions and
constrains language; on the other, linguistic behavior creatively
affects social relationships and the contexts of social action. The
class will use both ethnographic materials and modest field
investigations of its own to explore this dual relationship.
Prerequisite: Anthropology/Linguistics 311, either previously or
concurrently, or consent of the instructor. Conference.
Cross-listed as Anthropology 313.
Linguistics 321
- Phonology
Full course for one semester. Although no two utterances sound
exactly the same, speakers of a language overlook distinctions to
which mechanical recording devices are sensitive, and they "hear"
contrasts that are objectively not there. This course examines the
nature of the complex links between abstract language-specific
perceptual worlds and the real world of actual sounds in light of
the major empirical approaches and theoretical currents in the
study of linguistic sound systems. It will consider the relations
between the articulatory gestures of language and other levels of
linguistics description, notably morphology and syntax, and will
also explore different models for formulating phonological rules.
Prerequisite: Anthropology/Linguistics 311 or consent of the
instructor. Conference.
Linguistics 323
- Introductory Syntax
Full course for one semester. The course-accessible to students
with no previous training in linguistics-will introduce
increasingly extensive explicit grammar fragments of English, first
to present a range of phenomena of concern to syntax, and second to
explore formal devices that have been proposed to account for such
phenomena. The course will consider such topics as constituent
structure, subcategorization and selectional restrictions, idioms,
auxiliaries, question formation, grammatical relations, "movement"
rules, reflexives, complement clauses, relative clauses,
topicalization, coordination, and the like. The course also
introduces central concepts and notation from contemporary
theoretical syntax, focusing on the Principles and Parameters
framework developed by Noam Chomsky and others. Conference.
Linguistics 324
- Advanced Topics in Syntax
Full course for one semester. This course gives students the
opportunity to build on concepts and methodologies learned in
introductory syntax by exploring current research problems in
formal syntax. Readings for the course include influential papers
from the history of generative grammar, as well as more recent
contributions to the field. This course considers a wide variety of
languages, and addresses the issue of how formal syntactic theories
handle cross-linguistic variation. Topics covered may include word
order variation, constraints on phrase structure and movement,
functional categories, and the theory of anaphora. Prerequisite:
Linguistics 323 or equivalent, or consent of the instructor.
Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Linguistics 326
- Discourse
Full course for one semester. Within linguistics, the analysis of
discourse includes the study of linguistic units larger than the
sentence and extends, more generally, to the study of stretches of
speech (as well as written language) in the context of their use.
This course will introduce a linguistic approach to discourse,
touching topics possibly familiar from other disciplines: the
nature of text, the determinants of style, the variety of
linguistic genres, both written and spoken, and literacy and
orality, including conversation and gesture. The class will use
empirical materials from a variety of languages and cultural
traditions to fuel this exploration. Along the way, we will
consider some well-known conundrums surrounding such notions as
meaning, reference, topic, coherence, and context. Prerequisite:
Anthropology/Linguistics 311 or consent of the instructor.
Conference.
Linguistics 328
- Morphosyntactic Typology
Full course for one semester. The course will develop the notion of
linguistic typology based on the comparative study of the
morphology and syntax of the languages of the world. It will
consider such topics as parts of speech, word order, case marking,
grammatical relations cross-linguistically, passive and its
friends, causatives, relative clauses, and configurationality-all
with reference to both the familiar languages of Europe and less
familiar languages of the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, and
Oceania. Prerequisite: Anthropology/Linguistics 311, Linguistics
323 or consent of the instructor. Conference.
Linguistics 329
- Morphology
Full course for one semester. This course is an introduction to the
study of the internal structure of words, providing an overview of
contemporary morphological theory and analysis. Topics will include
a survey of word formation processes (such as affixation,
reduplication, and stem changes); the interface between word
structure and other domains of organization in the grammar, such as
sound structure (phonology) and sentence structure (syntax); and
the reality of morphological categories such as "morpheme."
Prerequisite: Linguistics/Anthropology 311 or consent of the
instructor. Conference.
Linguistics 332
- Dialects of English
Full course for one semester. This course is an introduction to
dialectology (the study of regional variation in language), with an
emphasis on the survey and analysis of the varieties of English
currently spoken in the world. Students will acquire a practical
knowledge of major lexical and structural differences among
dialects of English, and will gain hands-on experience in the
planning, implementation, and analysis of a dialect survey. Forms
of English to be discussed include varieties of American English
(Boston, New York, Southern, "Valley Girl") and British English
(BBC, Liverpool, Scottish), as well as Indian English, Australian
English, Singaporean English, and other colonial dialects. Other
topics include Yiddish English, English-based pidgins and Creoles,
and the influence of gender on language variation. Most of the
dialects will be illustrated in the classroom either by native
speakers or by audio-visual material, including video clips and
songs. Prerequisite: Anthropology/Linguistics 311 or consent of the
instructor. Conference. Not offered 2005-06.
Linguistics 336
- Linguistic Field Methods
Full course for one semester. Through the empirical study of a
non-European language, using native speaking informants, the course
will explore the aims and techniques of linguistic fieldwork.
Students will be expected to produce fragments of linguistic
description based on individual and conjoint elicitation.
Prerequisites: two courses in linguistics or consent of the
instructor. Conference with laboratory sessions. Not offered
2005-06.
Linguistics 338
- Language Acquisition
Full course for one semester. A central goal of linguistic theory
is to explain how children learn a first language despite
significant structural and typological differences between
different possible languages. The course explores patterns in the
acquisition of linguistic structure, concentrating on problems
posed by cross-linguistic variation. The course devotes special
attention to how children acquire spatial language in comparative
perspective. The course also considers the influence on acquisition
of the sociocultural matrix in which language use emerges.
Prerequisite: Anthropology/Linguistics 311 or consent of the
instructor. Conference-seminar. Not offered 2005-06.
Linguistics 341
- Semantics
Full course for one semester. The course will introduce the
systematic study of meaning in language, ranging from problems in
the semantic structure of lexical systems, and syntactic and
morphological contributions to sentence meaning, to competing
theories of truth-conditional semantics, situational semantics, and
putative universal semantic primitives for integrated linguistic
description. Prerequisite: Anthropology/Linguistics 311 or consent
of the instructor. Conference-seminar. Not offered 2005-06.
Linguistics 344
- Historical Linguistics
Full course for one semester. This course will introduce the
classical comparative method for identifying and comparing related
languages. It will consider sound change, grammatical and semantic
change, and the diffusion of linguistic features. It will consider
further perspectives on language change, including structuralist
(-functionalist) views, generative and variationist perspectives,
and notions of lexical diffusion. Prerequisite: a previous course
in linguistics or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not
offered 2005-06.
Linguistics 348
- Languages of the Americas
Full course for one semester. The study of the language families of
the Americas has been a central focus of both linguists and
anthropologists. The diversity of the languages, their exotic
nature compared to Indo-European, and the richness of materials
available makes especially rewarding intense study of particular
groups of languages. This course will concentrate, in any given
year, on one such family. Beginning with typological considerations
that locate the languages of the family within wider parameters of
linguistic description, the course will include detailed syntactic
treatment of at least one member of the family. We shall try to
evaluate competing descriptive mechanisms in light of the
structure, both syntactic and semantic, of the languages in
question. May be repeated for credit with consent of the
instructor. Prerequisite: Anthropology/Linguistics 311 or consent
of the instructor. Conference-seminar. Cross-listed as Anthropology
348.
Linguistics 373
- Gesture
Full course for one semester. Speech is normally accompanied by
movements and attitudes of the body that seem transparently to
relate to aspects of the speech itself: its rhythm, its
construction, and/or its meaning. The course will critically
examine research on gesticulation to consider two general sets of
questions, one linguistic and the other ethnographic. First, are
the cognitive processes that produce spoken language and those that
produce gesture related? Is the semiotic structure of gesture
language-like or distinct? In general, is gesture part of language
or something apart? Second, does gesture present or presuppose
knowledge of the world and the surroundings in a way parallel to or
distinct from that characteristic of spoken language and other
communicative modalities? How does it enter into communicative
action? The course will move from typologies of gesture, and
proposals about cognitive mechanisms underlying gesticulation,
through a variety of descriptive studies, to more detailed
examination of different kinds of gestures (their origins and
nature), and finally to interactive studies in which the
interpretability of gestures is the central issue. The course will
require original research by participants. Prerequisite:
Linguistics 311, Anthropology 211, or consent of the instructor.
Conference. Cross-listed as Anthropology 373. Not offered 2005-06.
Linguistics 393
- Psycholinguistics
See Psychology 393 for description.
Linguisticsw 430
- Signs
See Anthropology 430 for description.
Anthropology 430 Description
Linguistics 470
- Thesis
Full course for one year.
Linguistics 481
- Independent Reading
One-half or full course for one semester. Open only to upper-class
students with special permission.
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