This course describes current theorizing on how the human mind achieves high-level cognitive processes such as using language, thinking, and reasoning. The course discusses issues such as whether the language ability is unique to humans, whether there is a critical period to the acquisition of a language, the nature of conceptual knowledge, how people perform deductive reasoning and induction, and how linguistic and conceptual knowledge interact.

This is a seminar on how language relates to perception and cognition. The seminar pays particular attention to the question of whether and how language might affect (and be affected by) other mental processes, how different languages represent the mental and physical world, and how children acquire language-general and language-specific ways of encoding human experience. The course incorporates cross-linguistic, cognitive and developmental perspectives on a new and rapidly changing research area.

Students approaching the dissertation level will explore with faculty frontier areas of research on linguistic change and variation. Topics addressed in recent years include: experimental investigation of the reliability of syntactic judgments; the development of TMA systems in creoles; transmission of linguistic change across generations. The course may be audited by those who have finished their course work or taken for credit in more than one year.

Readings in modern morphological theory and evaluation of hypotheses in the light of synchronic and diachronic evidence from various languages.

Topics are chosen from such areas as featural representations; syllable theory; metrical structure; tonal phonology; prosodic morphology; interaction of phonology with syntax and morphology.

Selected topics either in Indo-European comparative linguistics or in historical and comparative method.

This course provides an introduction to the experimental study of meaning in natural language. We begin by introducing some basic notions of formal semantics and pragmatics and review relevant technical background. Next we discuss recent developments in studying meaning-related phenomena experimentally, which, in addition to theoretical questions, involve issues in the acquisition and processing of semantic information. In the course of this, we will also introduce the basics of experimental design and relevant psycholinguistic methodology. In addition to readings and homework assignments, students will embark on a small research project (individually or jointly), which will be presented in class at the end of the semester and written up as a term paper.

This course provides an introduction to formal semantics for natural language. The main aim is to develop a semantic system that provides a compositional interpretation of natural language sentences. We discuss various of the aspects central to meaning composition, including function application, modification, quantification, and binding, as well as issues in the syntax-semantics interface. The basic formal tools relevant for semantic analysis, including set theory, propositional logic, and predicate logic are also introduced.

This is a seminar on the acquisition of a first language by children. We will discuss the acquisition of the meanings of words and sentences, and the pragmatic and social interpretation of sentences in context. We will also consider how language relates to other cognitive systems and to human social reasoning. Particular emphasis will be placed on discovering the mechanisms children possess that enable them to learn and use language.

This course is an upper level undergraduate/graduate seminar in neurolinguistics. We will explore language in the brain through readings and discussions.