1 - 10 of 27 results for: LINGUIST

This course introduces students to the cognitive organization of linguistic structure and the social nature of language use. We will investigate language as it is used in our everyday lives, highlighting both the variability and systematic nature of all levels of linguistic structure. In doing so, we will discover how to approach language from a scientific perspective, learn the fundamentals of linguistic analysis, and understand the foundational concepts of the field of Linguistics.

The human capacity for language is able to support a staggering diversity of languages. But is anything possible in a human language, and is there anything that is common to all languages? Looking past the vast surface differences, linguists have discovered deep commonalities among the languages of the world as well as strict limits on the observed variation and on what a possible human language is. In this seminar, we will seek to uncover the building blocks of language and the laws that govern their interactions. Our goal will be to reach an understanding of the ways in which languages are systematically alike and different, as well as of the nature of language in general. We will investigate a variety of topics, including crosslinguistic differences and similarities with respect to word order, the grammatical structure of questions, and how languages mark subjects and objects. We will explore the structure of both sentences and words, identifying and studying their fundamental properties. In this pursuit, we will rely on data from a range of languages, such as English, Navajo, Zulu, and many others. This seminar will teach you how to view language as an object of scientific study, introducing you to central concepts and methods of linguistics (with a particular emphasis on syntax) along the way. It will give you the tools to describe and analyze even unfamiliar languages, and will teach you to construct explicit hypotheses about how language works and to test them empirically. There are no prerequisites for this course and no experience with linguistics will be assumed; the course is Socratically taught and there will be no textbook.

(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. Undergraduates considering a major in symbolic systems should take this course as early as possible in their program of study.

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.

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.

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:  Linguist 1 or equivalent or permission of the instructor.  Linguist 130A is not a prerequisite for this course.

How do people do things with language? How do we go from perceiving the acoustic waves that reach our ears to understanding that someone just announced the winner of the presidential election? How do we go from a thought to spelling that thought out in a sentence? How do babies learn language from scratch? This course is a practical introduction to psycholinguistics -- the study of how humans learn, represent, comprehend, and produce language. The course aims to provide students with a solid understanding of both the research methodologies used in psycholinguistic research and many of the well-established findings in the field. Topics covered will include visual and auditory recognition of words, sentence comprehension, reading, discourse and inference, sentence production, language acquisition, language in the brain, and language disorders. Students will conduct a small but original research project and gain experience with reporting and critiquing psycholinguistic research.

Introduction to linguistic research via presentations by Stanford linguistics faculty and graduate students. Open to undergraduate students interested in linguistics. Required for linguistics majors.