Results for LINGUIST

In this course, we will dispel many a mystery of English grammar, often presented as a dull and dreary subject in schools: we will see that the words ¿glamorous¿ and ¿grammar¿ come from the same root meaning ¿mysterious or occult¿ and we will ask: Why is there ¿stupidity¿ but not ¿smartity¿? Why can we ¿blacken¿ fish or ¿whiten¿ teeth, but not ¿pinken¿ or ¿greenen¿ anything? Who makes up new words anyway? How do we put words together into meaningful sentences? And how do we understand the nuances of English without much direct instruction? While the focus of this course is on English grammar, we will also see that other languages possess grammars that are based on the same principles and constraints.

Preference to freshmen. Variation and change in languages from around the world. The roots, historical development, and and linguistic and social structures of variation. How languages differ from each other, and how issues in linguistics connect to other social and cultural issues. The systematic study of language.

Practical approach to teaching English to non-native speakers. Teaching principles and the features of English which present difficulties. Preparation of lessons, practice teaching in class, and tutoring of non-native speaker.

The study of speech sounds: how to produce them, how to perceive them, and their acoustic properties. The influence of production and perception systems on sound change and phonological patterns. Acoustic analysis and experimental techniques. Lab exercises. Prerequisite: 110 or equivalent, or consent of instructor.

How language and society affect each other. Class, age, ethnic, and gender differences in speech. Prestige and stigma associated with different ways of speaking and the politics of language. The strategic use of language. Stylistic practice; how speakers use language to construct styles and adapt their language to different audiences and social contexts.

Focus is on issues of language, identity, and globalization, with a focus on Hip Hop cultures and the verbal virtuosity within the Hip Hop nation. Beginning with the U.S., a broad, comparative perspective in exploring youth identities and the politics of language in what is now a global Hip Hop movement. Readings draw from the interdisciplinary literature on Hip Hop cultures with a focus on sociolinguistics and youth culture.

Introduction to the variety of writing systems and their behaviors. Classification of all existing scripts as alphabetic, syllabic, ideographic; unifying and differentiating features within each group. How writing captures human language in various ways. The development of the alphabet, from ancient Semitic scripts to modern times. How writing systems are extended to additional languages. Chinese writing, its characteristics and sphere of influence. Japanese writing as a hybrid system that includes Chinese. Korean writing as an ideally designed script. The Indian system of writing as the foundation of numerous Asian syllabic scripts. Unicode as global standard for encoding text in all languages. Font technology: the emulation of human writing in the digital realm. nnBasic knowledge of phonetics recommended. Knowledge of foreign languages helpful.

Measurement of production and reception of spoken and written language. Cross-disciplinary comparison of assessments in educational, clinical, and engineering contexts.

The study of speech sounds: how to produce them, how to perceive them, and their acoustic properties. The influence of production and perception systems on sound change and phonological patterns. Acoustic analysis and experimental techniques. Lab exercises. Prerequisite: 110 or equivalent, or consent of instructor.

Introduces the basics of Minimalist architecture and structure-building operations, with attention to the communication of syntax with the phonological and semantic interfaces. Topics include phrase structure, locality and phases, phrasal and head movement, functional categories, and features. A previous graduate-level syntax course, or permission of the instructor required.

To reason about textual information we rely extensively on extra-linguistic information but the syntactic structure and lexical items used also play a role in guiding us to conclusions. In by now traditional semantic practice the contributions of those are treated in model theoretic terms. But formulas of first or higher order logic do not come with effective procedures for the reasoning that is required to draw inferences or answer questions given some natural language input. Natural Reasoning is a cover term we use for a family of proof-theoretic formal approaches that are currently used by computational linguists. The course will give an overview of proof-theoretic logic as applied to natural language, discuss some of the computational systems that incorporate this view (Stanford's NatLog, Bar Ilan's Biutee, Parc's Bridge) and conclude with a critical view of the linguistic generalizations that underlie these approaches and means to improve them or mitigate their shortcomings. The examples of natural reasoning will mainly be in the domain of monotonicity reasoning and reasoning about the factuality of events.

Expands on 130A/230A. Detailed study of selected topics in formal semantics and pragmatics. Prerequisites: LINGUIST 130A/230A or permission from instructor.

Registration for those students attending Thursday 2-3pm Semantics group. Maybe repeat for credit

Representations of meaning from psychological, linguistic, and computational viewpoints. Topics include lambda calculus, probabilistic programming, and vector spaces. Special emphasis on the challenges of semantic composition. May be repeated for credit.

Strengths and weaknesses of the principal methods of data collection in sociolinguistics.

Topics vary by quarter. Current topic is Sociophonetics. Repeatable for credit.nnThis seminar explores new methods of collecting and analyzing sociophonetic data in an experimental setting, including electroglottography, aerodynamic measures, speech resynthesis, and perception study tasks. Requirements include both collaborative and individual research projects.

Introduction to methods for collecting and analyzing quantitative linguistic data, with a primary focus on the use of corpora in exploring theoretical questions in various areas of linguistics. Topics include the access and retrieval of corpus data (including web-based corpora), data annotation, and statistical modeling. Practical experience with R, Python scripting, and setting up online experiments through Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Introduction to the variety of writing systems and their behaviors. Classification of all existing scripts as alphabetic, syllabic, ideographic; unifying and differentiating features within each group. How writing captures human language in various ways. The development of the alphabet, from ancient Semitic scripts to modern times. How writing systems are extended to additional languages. Chinese writing, its characteristics and sphere of influence. Japanese writing as a hybrid system that includes Chinese. Korean writing as an ideally designed script. The Indian system of writing as the foundation of numerous Asian syllabic scripts. Unicode as global standard for encoding text in all languages. Font technology: the emulation of human writing in the digital realm. nnBasic knowledge of phonetics recommended. Knowledge of foreign languages helpful.

Text information retrieval systems; efficient text indexing; Boolean, vector space, and probabilistic retrieval models; ranking and rank aggregation; evaluating IR systems. Text clustering and classification: classification algorithms, latent semantic indexing, taxonomy induction; Web search engines including crawling and indexing, link-based algorithms, and web metadata. Prerequisites: CS 107, CS 109, CS 161.

Restricted to students in the doctoral program. Student presentations of research toward qualifying papers.May be repeated for credit.

Morphological and syntactic variation and change. Reanalysis, grammaticalization. The use of corpora and quantitative evidence.