1 - 10 of 129 results for: LINGUIST

This course is an introduction to linguistics, the scientific study of language. It provides an intensive introduction to the main areas of linguistics: Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, Historical Linguistics, and Sociolinguistics. Through lectures, in-class activities, and homework assignments, you will gain familiarity with a variety of linguistic phenomena, learn to recognize regularity in their structure and patterning, develop skills for linguistic analysis, and come to appreciate how insights from linguistics can be brought to bear on real-world issues. While some of the course uses English to illuminate various points, you will learn to analyze a wide variety of languages other than English. By the end of the course, you should be able to explain similarities and differences across human languages, use linguistic terminology appropriately, apply the tools of linguistic analysis to linguistics problems, and understand the questions that drive much of the research in linguistics.

Human language affords an infinity of possible utterances. To know a language is not to know a finite list of memorized sentences - instead, not only can you produce and understand sentences never uttered before, but given any sentence you can always create a longer one. Yet, remarkably, the cognitive mechanisms that underlie this creativity are instantiated in a finite human brain. This course explores the nature of the human capacity for language and how it allows boundless creativity to emerge from limited resources. This course will teach you how to approach language as an object of scientific study, introducing you to central concepts, methods, and results in linguistics. Throughout the course you will analyze a wide variety of language data and will learn how to construct scientific hypotheses and test them empirically. A major component of the course will be the collective, hands-on construction of formal models (i.e. theories) of individuals' knowledge of their language. The course is Socratically taught and, while there will be occasional readings, there is no textbook. There are no prerequisites and no experience with linguistics will be assumed. This course is designed for anyone with an interest in language, linguistics, and/or cognitive science, as well as neighboring fields such as psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and philosophy.

We will investigate how inherent properties of language, such as ambiguity, vagueness and context-dependence, play into the meaning of a legal text, and how the meaning of a law can remain invariant while its range of application can change with the facts and with our discovery of what the facts are. Our focus will be on the perspective linguistic analysis brings to legal theory, addressing current controversies surrounding different conceptions of 'textualism' and drawing on well-known examples of legal reasoning about language in cases of identity fraud, obstruction of justice and genocide.

(Formerly SYMSYS 100). An overview of the interdisciplinary study of cognition, information, communication, and language, with an emphasis on foundational issues: What are minds? What is computation? What are rationality and intelligence? Can we predict human behavior? Can computers be truly intelligent? How do people and technology interact, and how might they do so in the future? Lectures focus on how the methods of philosophy, mathematics, empirical research, and computational modeling are used to study minds and machines. Students must take this course before being approved to declare Symbolic Systems as a major. All students interested in studying Symbolic Systems are urged to take this course early in their student careers. The course material and presentation will be at an introductory level, without prerequisites.

Preference to freshmen. Variation and change in languages from around the world; language and thought; variation in sound patterns and grammatical structures; linguistic and social structures of variation; how languages differ from one another and how issues in linguistics connect to other social and cultural issues; the systematic study of language.

As individuals, we would like to believe that we are free from biases and that we are somehow immune to acting on the social biases that we have been socialized to since birth. We would like to believe that we can report experiences accurately, recalling events as they truly happened. But, memory is faulty and stereotypes and social biases are pervasive. And, at a level beneath our own control, these biases slip in and influence our memory of events. Eyewitness memory, and the inaccuracy and unreliability of eyewitnesses, is a perfect example of this. But, what about the things we hear? Speech carries a great deal of information; packets of co-varying cues we have been raised to recognize categorically, informing us about a talker's race, accent, emotion, and gender. We have, through our ears, information about events that occur. And, we have in our minds, stereotyped expectations about how various groups of people behave and what various groups of people might say. In this course, we will explore how these two types of information (e.g., the percept of what is actually heard vs. our stereotypes about who is likely to have said what) clash together and influence 'earwitness memory'. We will read and critique journal articles, blogs, and popular science articles, think about the reliability of memory for auditory events, and we will work together to develop three well-designed thought experiments that address questions at the heart of this issue. Along the way, we will learn a bit about the acoustics of speech, social variation in speech, speech perception and spoken word recognition, memory, and experimental design and analysis. Students in this course should be committed to reading the assignments, sharing their ideas about the readings (without concern for 'being right'), and think creatively about ways we can explore the idea of earwitness memory together. While this is a one-quarter course, my goal is to pursue our thought experiments collaboratively, with any interested students in subsequent quarters.

We use language to communicate every day, but we take its complex and dynamic nature for granted. This introduction to Linguistics will ask students to rethink their assumptions about language and communication as it approaches the field with a special focus on speech and social interactions. The course is grounded in the production and perception of speech sounds: its physiological basis, its acoustic signal form, and its cognitive process of perception. From this foundation, the course will move on to explore how the subtle variation and change of sounds is used to construct identity, foster relationships, and shape community. We will also investigate how exciting linguistic research sheds light on important contemporary social debates and on speech technology. Throughout the course, students will supplement readings, exercises, and discussion with lab sessions that will teach them how to manipulate and analyze speech sound recordings. Their accumulated theoretical and practical knowledge will find its expression in an intensive research project drawing on social media data. There is no prerequisite for this course.

The pronunciation of a word varies across different speakers, and even across different utterances produced by the same speaker. This course is an introduction to phonetics, covering articulation, acoustics, and perception. Students will gain basic skills in experimental phonetics, including instrumental analysis of speech production using phonetic software (Praat), interpreting behavioral responses in listening tasks, and using the International Phonetic Alphabet. By the end of this course, you will be able to (1) understand the processes involved in articulating speech sounds; (2) understand what acoustic patterns result from articulatory characteristics and how to identify visualizations of them; (3) manipulate speech samples to test how listeners experience language and categorize different speech sounds.

This course will introduce you to the International Phonetic Alphabet, which we will use to transcribe and understand sound patterns across a diverse set of languages. In order to effectively transcribe languages phonetically, you will also learn about the articulatory properties of each sound of the worlds languages and how to produce each sound (even those that are not native to you) in isolation and in various contexts. You will also gain practical skills in recording and labeling acoustic files in Praat (a program for acoustic analysis and other phonetic work). The final project for the class, which will take place in the final two weeks of the course, will involve applying the skills you learned towards describing and transcribing patterns of variation in a language or dialect that you do not speak.