1 - 10 of 32 results for: LINGUIST

In this course, we explore the world of words: their creation, evolution, borrowing, change, and death. Words are the key to understanding the culture and ideas of a people, and by tracing the biographies of words we are able to discern how the world was, is, and might be perceived and described. We trace how words are formed, and how they change in pronunciation, spelling, meaning, and usage over time. How does a word get into the dictionary? What do words reveal about status, class, region, and race? How is the language of men and women critiqued differently within our society? How does slang evolve? How do languages become endangered or die, and what is lost when they do? We will visit the Facebook Content Strategy Team and learn more about the role words play in shaping our online experiences. Together, the class will collect Stanford language and redesign the digital dictionary of the future. Trigger Warning: Some of the subject matter of this course is sensitive and may cause offense. Please consider this prior to enrolling in the course.

The many ways language is used in the construction of sexuality and sexual identity. How language is used as a resource for performing and perceiving sexual identity. Drawing on linguistic analyses of pronunciation, word choice, and grammar, questions such as: Is there a gay accent? Why isn't there a lesbian accent? How do transgendered people modify their linguistic behavior when transitioning? How are unmarked (heterosexual) identities linguistically constructed? Sexuality as an issue of identity, as well as of desire. Iconic relations between elements of language such as breathy voice quality and high pitch, and aspects of desire such as arousal and excitement. How language encodes ideologies about sexuality; how language is used to talk about sexuality in public discourses about gay marriage and bullying, as well as in personal narratives of coming out. How language encodes dominant ideologies about sexuality, evident in labels for sexual minorities as well as terminology for sex acts. Discussions of readings, explorations of how sexuality is portrayed in popular media, and analyses of primary data. Final research paper on a topic of student choice.

Stanford was built on land originally inhabited by the Muwekma Ohlone tribe, and Native American students have always held an important place in the university community from the writer and journalist John Milton Oskison (Cherokee) who graduated in 1894 to current enrolments of over three hundred students who represent over fifty tribes. Two hundred years ago, the Muwekma language was one of a hundred languages that made California one of the most linguistically-diverse places on earth. Today, less than half of these languages survive but many California Indian communities are working hard to maintain and revitalize them. This is a familiar pattern globally: languages around the world are dying at such a rapid rate that the next century could see half of the world's 6800 languages and cultures become extinct unless action is taken now. Focusing especially on California, this course seeks to find out how and why languages die; what is lost from a culture when that occurs; and how `sleeping¿ languages might be revitalized. We will take a field trip to a Native American community in northern California to witness first-hand how one community is bringing back its traditional language, songs, dances, and story-telling. We will learn from visiting indigenous leaders and linguistic experts who will share their life, language, and culture with the class. Through weekly readings and discussion, we will investigate how languages can be maintained and revitalized by methods of community- and identity-building, language documentation and description, the use of innovative technologies, writing dictionaries and grammars for different audiences, language planning, and data creation, annotation, preservation, and dissemination. Finally, the course will examine ethical modes of fieldwork within endangered-language communities.

The English vernacular spoken by African Americans in big city settings, and its relation to Creole English dialects spoken on the S. Carolina Sea Islands (Gullah), in the Caribbean, and in W. Africa. The history of expressive uses of African American English (in soundin' and rappin'), and its educational implications. Service Learning Course (certified by Haas Center).

Phonetics is the systematic study of speech. In this class, we will learn about the physical gestures and timing involved in the articulation of spoken language and about the resulting acoustic signal that is decoded into linguistic units by the human auditory system. The class is structured into two parts: A practical lab component, and a class component. This course highlights both the complexity of the physical nature of producing spoken language, and the highly variable acoustic signal that is interpreted by listeners as language. By the end of this course, you should: (1) Understand the process of preparing an utterance to articulating it; (2) Understand the basic acoustic properties of speech; (3) Provide detailed phonetic transcriptions of speech; (4) Produce and understand the gestures involved in nearly all of the world¿s speech sounds, and (5) Understand the ways this knowledge can be used to advance our understanding of spoken language understanding by humans and machines.

Introduction to the sound systems of the world's languages, their similarities and differences. Theories that account for the tacit generalizations that govern the sound patterns of languages.

Linguistic meaning and its role in communication. Topics include ambiguity, vagueness, presupposition, intonational meaning, and Grice's theory of conversational implicature. 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 also enroll in 130C. Pre- or corequisite: 120, 121, consent of instructor, or graduate standing in Linguistics.

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. This course must be taken for a minimum of 3 units to be eligible for Ways credit

Extracting meaning, information, and structure from human language text, speech, web pages, genome sequences, social networks. Methods include: string algorithms, edit distance, language modeling, the noisy channel, naive Bayes, inverted indices, collaborative filtering, PageRank. Applications such as question answering, sentiment analysis, information retrieval, text classification, social network models, chatbots, genomic sequence alignment, spell checking, speech processing, recommender systems. Prerequisite: CS103, CS107, CS109.