51 - 60 of 129 results for: LINGUIST

Current topics in phonological theory and analysis. Meetings consist of presentations of ongoing research, collaborative work, and discussions of theoretical and methodological advances in the field.

This course is a seminar on how experimental work can provide evidence for sound change, both to shed light on the general mechanisms of how sound changes occur and also what specific developments are plausible, particularly when the comparative evidence is ambiguous or the phonetic characteristics of the reconstructed categories are under consideration. The course explores the processes that lead to changes, including biases that exist in perception and production and shifts in how the phonology maps onto the phonetic details, and what predictions they make. We will examine some of the experimental methods that provide evidence for sound change, and discuss which aspects of these approaches parallel diachronic change and what aspects are limitations for the parallel.

Topics in word prosody, sentence prosody, and poetic metrics. The course combines lectures and readings with hands-on corpus work using R, with the opportunity to develop joint projects. Prerequisites: Either LINGUIST 210A or LINGUIST 110 plus consent of instructor.

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.

An investigation of central issues in the study of the interface between syntax and morphology.

Engages students in the scientific study of human language syntax at the intermediate level, building on LINGUIST 120A. Students collectively construct a formal theory of syntax which models individuals' implicit knowledge of language, drawing on data from a variety of languages, including but not limited to English. Emphasis is on exploring how languages are systematically alike in their syntactic structures, and the ways in which they are systematically different. Students engage in hands-on analysis of natural language data as well as the construction and evaluation of syntactic theories. The course focuses on formal developments in the theory of phrase structure (such as X-bar theory) and transformations (such as locality and other constraints on syntactic dependencies). Specific topics covered include head and phrasal movement, case and agreement, raising and control, and the structure of clauses and nominals. Can be taken as LINGUIST 220 by co-term MA students or advanced undergraduates.

The first course in the three-course graduate-level sequence in syntax. The course focuses on core theoretical ideas and empirical phenomena in the study of syntactic theory. Some of the specific topics include phrase structure, head movement, A-movement, case and agreement, raising and control, argument structure, binding, and the structure of clauses and nominals. The practical aim of this course is to 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.

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.

This course is a continuation of 222A and 222B. We will focus on topics that have emerged or become central in the last three decades or so that may have not been covered in depth in 222A or 222B. As we survey these topics, we will pay special attention to conceptual issues (e.g. the architecture of the language faculty), to the specific details of particular analyses (e.g. the mechanics and operations involved), and to how the theory is informed by crosslinguistic variation.