11 - 20 of 32 results for: LINGUIST

Every time you speak a word, you say it differently than the time before. Getting all the movements used during speech production to produce an exact repetition of a word is nearly impossible. Your friends and family also vary in how they say words, and this variation differs across speech styles, emotions, and social communities. Imagine that. Our minds encounter thousands of different productions of a single word, but somehow identify it as one word, and not another. Phonetics is the systematic study of the articulation, acoustics, and perception in speech and can help us explain how different talkers vary their speech, how information from speech is used by listeners to understand one another, and how listeners store social and linguistic information in memory. Through lectures, class activities, and weekly lab assignments, this class highlights both the complexity of the physical nature of speech production, how we can understand the resulting acoustic signal, and how that signal is interpreted and understood by listeners. By the end of this course, you will be able to (1) look at a visual representation of speech and understand what you are looking at; (2) manipulate speech samples to understand how listeners experience language and categorize different speech sounds; (3) understand the processes involved in articulating speech sounds; (4) explain how linguistic segments interact with cues to emotion, gender, and other macro-social attributes; and (5) identify the ways an understanding of speech variation can be used to advance our understanding of spoken language understanding my humans and machines. We will be using the software program Praat (https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/) weekly, beginning the first week of class. Please download the program and have it installed on your computer before class begins.

Major contemporary approaches to morphology. Word-based vs. morpheme-based morphol- ogy. Realizational vs. generative morphology. Affix ordering and morphological constituency. The mirror principle. The morphology/syntax boundary and the lexicalist hypothesis. Compound- ing: synthetic and phrasal compounds, incorporation. Prosodic morphology. The semantics of inflection and derivation. Feature decomposition of inflectional categories: markedness, blocking, underspecification. Gaps and periphrasis. Inheritance hierarchies. Valence-changing operations. A graduate-level course in syntax or phonology required.

The second course in the graduate-level sequence in syntax. The course focuses on the properties of movement and its place in the overall architecture of grammar. We will be concerned with the nature of unbounded dependency constructions such as constituent questions, topicalization, relative clauses, clefts, and others. Some of the specific themes include A-bar movement, locality and constraints on extraction, successive cyclicity, as well as crosslinguistic variation in the way unbounded dependencies are established. The practical aim of this course is to further develop a solid conceptual, analytical and empirical basis for research in syntax; this includes the honing of syntactic argumentation skills, which is accomplished through written work and in-class discussion.

Presentation of ongoing research in syntax and morphology. May be repeated for credit.

Linguistic meaning and its role in communication. Topics include logical semantics, conversational implicature, presupposition, and speech acts. Applications to issues in politics, the law, philosophy, advertising, and natural language processing. Those who have not taken logic, such as  PHIL 150  or 151, should attend section. Prerequisites: LINGUIST 1, SYMSYS 1 ( LINGUIST 35), consent of instructor, or graduate standing in Linguistics

Presentation of ongoing research in semantics and pragmatics. May be repeated for credit.

Over the past 20 years, linguists have become increasingly interested in testing theories with a wider range of empirical data than the traditionally accepted introspective judgments of hand-selected linguistic examples. Consequently, linguistics has seen a surge of interest in psycholinguistic methods across all subfields. This course will provide an overview of various standard psycholinguistic techniques and measures, including offline judgments (e.g., binary categorization tasks like truth-value judgments, Likert scale ratings, continuous slider ratings), response times, reading times, and eye-tracking. Students will present and discuss research articles, but the bulk of the course is project-based: students will run an experiment (either a replication or an original design, if conducive to the student's research) to gain hands-on experience with experimental design and web-based experimentation; data management, analysis, and visualization in R; and open science tools like git/GitHub and pre-registration.