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

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.

Detailed study of topics in syntax and semantics, e.g., pronominalization, negation, complementation. Topics vary from term to term.

Readings in the cultural evolution of language. This encompasses research on the contribution of processes of cultural change to the emergence of language in the human species, the emergence of new languages, and language change viewed as a cultural-evolutionary process. There will be an emphasis on research employing empirical methods, particularly experimentation. Otherwise focus varies from term to term.

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

The goal of this course is to give students the concepts and skills they need to apply methods from Deep Learning and Large Language Models in research on speech, language, and communication. We will survey the interesting past, the exciting present, and the promising but uncertain future of these technologies, focusing on their limitations as well as their capabilities.
A key idea is moving from local to contextual features, "situated" relative to patterns learned from large bodies of training material. Instead of words in isolation, we look at patterns of words in text; instead of 10-to-30-msec audio windows in isolation, we look at patterns of signal-derived features in phrase-sized contexts. Used as inputs to a wide variety of prediction and classification systems, these approaches lead to large improvements in performance.
We will also survey the wide range of architectures and training methods, including the spectrum from supervised to lightly-supervised, self-supervised, and unsupervised methods; and also the integration of these systems with other old and new structures from physics, mathematics, and linguistics. We will explore the relevance of the learning models to the central issues in the science of language and how language is situated in the human cognitive system. The details of coverage will depend in part on the interests of participants.
No specific prerequisites are required, though obviously participants will need at least basic programming skills.

This course continues the introduction to Experiments in the study of meaning in natural language from LING 455. A large focus will be practical aspects of designing and implementing experiments, while covering a range of current topics from the experimental semantics and pragmatics literature (and exploring new avenues) along the way, e.g., pronouns and definite reference, presuppositions, quantifiers and domain restriction, generics. We'll start with some basic aspects of experimental design, including counter-balancing, controlling for confounds, utilizing fillers, as well as a range of key experimental task paradigms, such as simple truth- value judgments and picture sentence matching, acceptability ratings, reading time studies, and visual world eye tracking. For implementation, we will introduce the PCIbex platform at https://farm.pcibex.net and its relevant functionalities. Students will select a topic area, either individually or in small groups, and start from a survey article or recent journal paper to familiarize themselves with current issues. Next, they will formulate their own question, decide on a suitable task paradigm, and begin fleshing out a full experiment implementation, with the goal of collecting data at the end of the semester (if at all possible). The project will then be written up in a term paper. This provides students with the opportunity to engage in a scientific investigation of their own early on in their career in a domain that is easily accessible and yet central to the general enterprise of the cognitive sciences.

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 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.

Speech communities as a focus for the understanding of language evolution and change: language variation in time and space. The relationship between language structure and language use; between language change and social change. Populations as differentiated by age, sex, social class, race, and ethnicity, and the relationship of these factors to linguistic differentiation.