A reading course on specialized topics in linguistics. Arranged by instructor.

This seminar extends the methods and models from the formal study of language to other domains of cognition and perception including learning, memory, development, judgement and decision making, and organizational behavior in social networks. The aim to restore the centrality of language in the study of the mind and artificial intelligence.

Topics in Psycholinguistics

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.

The first part of the course expands the system from LING 580 to include intensional contexts. In particular, we discuss analyses of modals, attitude verbs, and conditionals, as well as the scope of noun phrases in modal environments. The second part of the course discusses a selection of topics from current work in semantics, such as the semantics of questions, tense and aspect, donkey anaphora, indefinites, genericity, degree constructions, events and situations, domain restriction, plurality and focus.

This course provides a thorough introduction to the study of Pidgin and Creole languages, including an overview of their history and development. It focuses on the socio-historical context of their genesis, their morpho-syntactic properties, diachronic development, cognitive processes at work in creole formation and the resulting linguistic make-up. The status of creoles and their use in education are also examined. In addition to an individual mid-term and final paper, students will conduct a collaborative project consisting of comparing linguistic features in a set of creoles to other languages in their environment. The class will use data from the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures (2013) and from Pidgin, Creoles and Mixed Languages (Velupillai, 2015) in addition to multiple other sources. Diachronic data for some of the creoles will also be examined.

The second half of a year-long introduction to the formal study of natural language syntax. Topics to be covered include grammatical architecture; derivational versus representational statement of syntactic principles; movement and locality; the interface of syntax and semantics; argument structure; and other topics. The emphasis is on reading primary literature and discussing theoretical approaches, along with detailed case-studies of specific syntactic phenomena in different languages.

An investigation of the psychological representations and processing of words. Topics include: the extraction of words from speech; lexical access and production; the induction of morphological and phonological regularities in word learning; decomposition of morphologically complex words; frequency effects in morphological processing; storage vs. computation in the lexicon; the past tense debate; morphological change. This course makes extensive use of linguistic corpora. Students will also be familiarized with experimental design issues in the psycholinguistic study of the lexicon.

Second half of a year-long introduction; continues LING 530. Topics to be surveyed include syllable structure and moraic theory; the prosodic hierarchy; the properties and representation of geminates; templatic and prosodic morphology; reduplication and emergence of the unmarked; and metrical phonology (properties of stress, foot typology, and issues of constituency). Emphasizes hands-on analysis of a wide range of data.