Results for LINGUIST

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. If you have any questions about the course, please email symsys1staff@gmail.com.

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.

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.

A data-driven introduction to the study of generative syntax through an in-depth investigation of the sentence structure of English. Emphasis is on central aspects of English syntax, but the principles of theory and analysis extend to the study of the syntax of other languages. The course focuses on building up syntactic argumentation skills via the collective development of a partial formal theory of sentence structure, which attempts to model native speaker knowledge. Satisfies the WIM requirement for Linguistics and the WAY-FR requirement. Prerequisites: none (can be taken before or after Linguistics 121B). The discussion section is mandatory.

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

Introduction to basic concepts and issues in the linguistic study of word meaning. We explore grammatical regularities in word meaning and the relation between word meaning and the conceptual realm. The questions we address include the following. How is the meaning of a word determined from its internal structure? How can simple words have complex meanings? What is a possible word? How does a word's meaning determine the word's syntactic distribution and what kind of reasoning does it support? What kind of information belongs to the lexical entry of a word? The course will show that the investigation¿of the linguistic and semantic structure of words draws on the full resources of linguistic theory and methodology. Prerequisites: SYMSYS1, LINGUIST1, LINGUIST35, or equivalent or permission of the instructor. LINGUIST 130A is not a prerequisite for this course.

This course surveys how languages express members of the basic conceptual categories entity, event, property, and spatial relation. It examines strategies languages use to name members of these categories, and factors that might influence the choices languages make. Relatedly, it explores similarities and differences among languages in the sets of words they have to express notions within various conceptual domains. Restricted to undergraduates. Prerequisites: Linguist 116A, 121A, 121B, 130A, or 130B, or permission of the instructor

This course examines the linguistic structure of discourse, with a particular emphasis on learning to identify the emergent structures of spontaneous conversations. Specific topics include inference and implicature, discourse cohesion, turn-taking, discourse markers, narrative, and reference. Through class discussions and hands-on data analysis, students will explore how the structure of discourse is shaped by cognition, grammar, and social relationships. Prerequisite: Linguist 1, 121A, 121B, 130A, 130B, 145, 150, or 155F

This course explores the social life of spoken language. Students learn to address the following big questions about language and society: Why do languages vary across different time periods, locations, and social groups? What do our opinions about the way other people speak tell us about society? How do our social identities and goals influence the way we speak? And how do we use language to alter our social relationships?

The role of language in the construction of gender, the maintenance of the gender order, and social change. Field projects explore hypotheses about the interaction of language and gender. No knowledge of linguistics required.

This course examines constructed languages, which are languages that were invented rather than arising naturally. We will cover the components that characterize a language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and writing systems. These characteristics vary among languages of the world, so constructing a language involves many decisions about each of these characteristics. Using the tools of linguistic theory, we will analyze examples of constructed languages, both those from fiction (e.g. Klingon, High Valyrian, Sindarin) and those intended for real-world usage (e.g. Esperanto). Students will each construct their own language based on the concepts we discuss.

Extracting meaning, information, and structure from human language text, speech, web pages, social networks. Introducing methods (regex, edit distance, naive Bayes, logistic regression, neural embeddings, inverted indices, collaborative filtering, PageRank), applications (chatbots, sentiment analysis, information retrieval, question answering, text classification, social networks, recommender systems), and ethical issues in both. Prerequisites: CS106B, Python (at the level of CS106A), CS109 (or equivalent background in probability), and programming maturity and knowledge of UNIX equivalent to CS107 (or taking CS107 or CS1U concurrently).

Designed for undergraduates beginning or working on research projects in linguistics. Participants present and receive feedback on their projects and receive tips on the research and writing process.

Senior capstone seminar. Joint readings in an annually varying topic, exploring the implications and importance of linguistic research for other domains of knowledge or practice.

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.

Introduction to phonological theory and analysis based on cross-linguistic evidence. Topics: phonological representations including features, syllables, metrical structure; phonological processes; phonological rules and constraints; phonological typology and universals; the phonology/morphology interface; Optimality Theory and Harmonic Grammar. Prerequisites: Linguist 110 or 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.

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.

Seminar on advanced topics in syntax. Topics may vary from year to year. May be repeated for credit.

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

The primary goal of this course is to cover advanced topics in semantics and pragmatics that are central to research in those fields. The course is aimed at advanced students who plan to do research in semantics, pragmatics, or philosophy of language. Prerequisites:¿LINGUIST 130A/230A or permission from instructor.

This course examines the linguistic structure of discourse, with a particular emphasis on learning to identify the emergent structures of spontaneous conversations. Specific topics include inference and implicature, discourse cohesion, turn-taking, discourse markers, narrative, and reference. Through class discussions and hands-on data analysis, students will explore how the structure of discourse is shaped by cognition, grammar, and social relationships. Prerequisite: Linguist 1, 121A, 121B, 130A, 130B, 145, 150, or 155F

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.

Regular meetings of members of the Alps Lab.

"Sociolinguistics in the Chinese Diaspora" is a graduate seminar that explores the intersection of language, culture, and identity among Chinese communities spread across different parts of the world, with a specific emphasis on the North American Diaspora. The course covers a range of topics, including bilingualism, code-switching, language variation, and language ideologies within the Chinese diaspora. Prerequisites: LINGUIST 1, LINGUIST 150, LINGUIST 105/205A, or permission of instructor

Sociophonetic, discourse-analytic, and computational approaches to social interaction. Meetings consist of presentations of research, discussions of readings, and collaborative research project work. Prerequisites: Linguist 250, Linguist 258, or Linguist 258A

The quantitative study of linguistic variability in time, space, and society emphasizing social constraints in variation. Hands-on work with variable data. Prerequisites: 105/205 and 250, or consent of instructor.

Language contact occurs when the speakers of two or more languages or varieties come interact with each other. In this introduction to Contact Linguistics, you will learn some of the structural outcomes of contact as they relate to the communities and individuals coming into contact. Prerequisites: Graduate standing or permission of instructor. Open to undergraduates with permission of instructor only.

Regular meetings of the Contact, Variation, and Change Research Lab. Meetings consist of presentations of research, discussions of readings, and collaborative research project work.

This lab-based course is an overview of research methods that are used in the development of Black educators, including survey research, individual and focus group interviews, ethnographic methods, and documentary activism. Lab participants will be guided through critical thinking about the professional and personal development of Black educators while assessing the utility and relevance of research-based responses to that development in partnership with a particular educational organization or agency.

Extracting meaning, information, and structure from human language text, speech, web pages, social networks. Introducing methods (regex, edit distance, naive Bayes, logistic regression, neural embeddings, inverted indices, collaborative filtering, PageRank), applications (chatbots, sentiment analysis, information retrieval, question answering, text classification, social networks, recommender systems), and ethical issues in both. Prerequisites: CS106B, Python (at the level of CS106A), CS109 (or equivalent background in probability), and programming maturity and knowledge of UNIX equivalent to CS107 (or taking CS107 or CS1U concurrently).

Methods for processing human language information and the underlying computational properties of natural languages. Focus on deep learning approaches: understanding, implementing, training, debugging, visualizing, and extending neural network models for a variety of language understanding tasks. Exploration of natural language tasks ranging from simple word level and syntactic processing to coreference, question answering, and machine translation. Examination of representative papers and systems and completion of a final project applying a complex neural network model to a large-scale NLP problem. Prerequisites: calculus and linear algebra; CS124, CS221, or CS229.

Introduction to spoken language technology with an emphasis on dialogue and conversational systems. Deep learning and other methods for automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis, affect detection, dialogue management, and applications to digital assistants and spoken language understanding systems. Prerequisites: CS124, CS221, CS224N, or CS229.

Regular meetings of the members of the Jurafsky Lab.

Restricted to Linguistics Ph.D. students. Student presentations of research toward qualifying papers. May be repeated for credit.

Mentored research project for first-year graduate students in linguistics.