First half of a year-long introduction to the formal study of phonology. Basic concepts in articulatory phonetics; the distribution of sounds (phonemes and allophones); underlying and surface forms, and how to relate them using both ordered-rule and surface-constraint approaches. The survey of theoretical topics in this term includes distinctive features (context, organization, underspecification); the autosegmental representation of tone; and the theory of phonological domains and their interaction with morphological and syntactic constituency. Emphasizes hands-on analysis of a wide range of data.

Speech: its linguistic transcription, its quantitative physical description, and its relationship to the categories and dimensions of language structure and use. The physical basis of speech: acoustics, vocal tract anatomy and physiology, hearing and speech perception, articulation and motor control. Phonetic variation and change. Prosody: stress, intonation, phrasing speech rate. Phonetic instrumentation, the design and interpretation of phonetic experiments, and the use of phonetic evidence in linguistic research, with emphasis on computer techniques. Introduction to speech signal processing. Speech technology: introduction to speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speech coding. This course will emphasize the phonetics of natural speech, and its connections to issues in other areas of linguistics and cognitive science.

Evolutionary linguistics Scholars have been interested in the origins and evolution of language for hundreds of years, and work was published on the topic throughout the twentieth century. The end of the century, however, saw a considerable upsurge in serious scientific interest, leading to increasing interdisciplinary communication on the topic and the development of new empirical tools. This course offers an introduction to the literature in this field, bringing together research from a diverse range of disciplines, and laying out what questions remain and how they might possibly be answered.

Game Theory has provided a new way of looking at linguistic meaning, particularly pragmatics (the use of language). This course will survey the use of Game Theory in linguistics as well as develop the techniques for studying signaling behavior. We will look at the formal foundations of signaling with particular attention paid to games of incomplete information (games where even which game is being played is uncertain). This will allow us to extend pragmatics beyond Gricean conversational maxims to areas like deception and polite signaling.

This course will explore some issues concerning the internal structure of words. After a brief introduction to some basic terms and concepts, we will discuss the interaction of morphology with phonology. We will look both at how morphology conditions phonological rules and how phonology conditions morphology. Then we will turn to the interaction of syntax and morphology. We will look at some problems raised by inflectional morphology, clitics and compounds. The main requirement for the class will be a series of homework exercises in morphological analysis and a short paper at the end of the semester.

This course investigates how quantitative methods can be combined with linguistic analysis to improve our understanding of phonetic and phonological phenomena, including variation. Students learn to carry out original research on data from time-aligned speech corpora of English varieties.

This course traces the linguistic history of English from its earliest reconstructable ancestor, Proto-Indo-European, to the present. We focus especially on significant large-scale changes, such as the restructuring of the verb system in Proto-Germanic, the intricate interaction of sound changes in the immediate prehistory of Old English, syntactic change in Middle English, and the diversification of English dialects since 1750.

This tutorial allows students to deal in a concentrated manner with selected major topics in linguistics by means of extensive readings and research. Two topics are studied during the semester, exposing students to a range of sophisticated linguistic questions.