| source Northwestern (X) |
level |
department LING Linguistics (X) |
In this seminar, we will explore some of the ways that language is used to construct, negotiate, present, and/or conceal sexual identity and orientation. We will examine the language of sexual minority groups, focusing on the language of and about gay men and lesbians. Some of the topics to be covered include gender vs. sexuality vs. sex, the meaning and use of Âreclaimed epithets (e.g. dyke and queer), on-line presentation of sexuality, menÂs voices and the perception of sexual identity, and cross-cultural constructions of sexuality.
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This course explores all of the main subdisciplines of linguistics by viewing them from an evolutionary perspective. Topics include: the biological basis of human language and other animal communication systems; a survey of the main issues in the evolution of the human language capacity; sounds, syntactic structures, and meanings in the world's languages. This course counts toward the Weinberg College Area I Distribution Requirement in Natural Sciences.
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Linguistics 250 is an introduction to the sound structure of language. We will learn to describe speech sounds in the three domains of speech: the articulatory domain (how speech sounds are produced in the human vocal tract), the acoustic domain (their form in the acoustic medium), and the perceptual domain (how listeners process the incoming speech signal). We will learn to recognize the ways in which speech sounds pattern in language to convey meaning, and the ways in which these patterns are similar and different across the languages of the world. This course will focus on the sound structure of English; however, we will also explore the sound structure of other languages. Students will have the opportunity to analyze their own speech using state-of-the-art acoustic digital signal processing software.
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This course introduces grammatical principles that govern the structure of words (morphology) and sentences (syntax) in human languages around the world. The aim of the course is to develop your appreciation for both the variation found in human languages and the essential unity underlying that variation, and to strengthen your skills in analytic reasoning through the study of linguistic patterns. Lectures, assignments and tests will use examples from English as well as other languages.
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A comparative overview of the classification and analysis of the major features and structures found across languages of the world. Rather than providing a broad survey of a wide range of issues, the course will present more extended case studies of a few issues. This quarter the course will particularly be concerned with issues involving word order, case systems, grammatical relations, and grammatical relation changing rules, such as passivization and causativization. If time permits, the course will conclude with a brief unit on lexical semantic typology.
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This course deals with the physical and cognitive description of language sound structure. It covers speech production, the analysis of acoustic recordings, and the principles by which syllable structure, stress, and sequential constraints govern the possible forms of words. Fundamentals of experimental design and data analysis will be introduced through laboratory exercises.
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The goals of this course are to introduce students to the fundamental principles of theoretical syntax, to place them in a position to pursue more advanced study in syntax, and to provide a foundation for their own research. Students will learn the analytical methods used in syntactic research: how to analyze syntactic data, how to formulate plausible hypotheses to explain the data, and how to compare and evaluate hypotheses. Thus, the main focus of the course is on learning how to do syntax, and secondarily on learning a particular theory of syntax. No textbook will be used, and there will be minimal reading assignments; instead, the course will proceed on the basis of class discussion and weekly written assignments. Although the primary source of linguistic data will be English, examples will also be drawn from other languages both in class and on the assignments.
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This course examines the internal structure of words and productive processes for creating new words. It surveys different types of word formation processes (such as inflection and derivation, nonconcatenative systems, and compounding). We will explore phonological, syntactic, and semantic constraints on these processes, and develop formal representations revealing how properties of complex words relate to properties of their component parts. We will also discuss how insights from the generative literature may be integrated with insights from the psycholinguistic literature on morphological processing.
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This course is an introduction to the basic concepts and methods of semantics and pragmatics. We will explore different aspects of meaning (word meaning, sentence meaning, truth conditions, speech acts) and inference types (entailment, presupposition, implicature), become familiar with the analytical tools used to investigate these phenomena, and discuss major theoretical approaches to the study of linguistic meaning. This course is a prerequisite for higher-level courses in semantics and pragmatics, and is recommended to students specializing in other areas of linguistics as a comprehensive overview of linguistic meaning.
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This course examines the linguistic manifestations of prejudice: the ways in which we judge people by the way they speak, how names and labels affect perception, and how prejudice is encoded and enforced in the language we use. Students will analyze prejudice against speech stemming from various sources: region, gender, race, ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, and country of origin. We will also explore the language used to express the prejudices found in our society, from ethnic slurs and other taboo words to gender-biased language.
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In LING 222 Language, Politics, and Identity students will examine and analyze political and identity issues in terms of the languages and dialects of the Balkans (particularly: Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Romany, and Serbian). Topics to be covered include: linguistic nationalism, language laws, rights of minority languages, language discrimination, language and religion, alphabet issues, language and dialect as ethnic identity, standard language, and others. This course will introduce the student to some of the key issues that have plagued the Balkans in the past and continue to shape its future. This course fulfills an Area V, Ethics and Values, Distribution Requirement.
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Linguistics 250 is an introduction to the sound structure of language. We will learn to describe speech sounds in the three domains of speech: the articulatory domain (how speech sounds are produced in the human vocal tract), the acoustic domain (their form in the acoustic medium), and the perceptual domain (how listeners process the incoming speech signal). We will learn to recognize the ways in which speech sounds pattern in language to convey meaning, and the ways in which these patterns are similar and different across the languages of the world. This course will focus on the sound structure of English; however, we will also explore the sound structure of other languages. Students will have the opportunity to analyze their own speech using state-of-the-art acoustic digital signal processing software.
Score: 12.415997 Details | Listing | Web page
This course introduces grammatical principles that govern the structure of words (morphology) and sentences (syntax) in human languages around the world. The aim of the course is to develop your appreciation for both the variation found in human languages and the essential unity underlying that variation, and to strengthen your skills in analytic reasoning through the study of linguistic patterns. Lectures, assignments and tests will use examples from English as well as other languages.
Score: 12.415997 Details | Listing | Web page
We effortlessly recognize printed and spoken words, understand novel and complex sentences, and produce fluent speech thousands of times each day. Psycholinguistics aims to understand how we do this; to understand the structure of the mental processes that support these behaviors. This course will introduce you to the theoretical and practical aspects of this field. Reading, critical analysis, and discussion of current research papers will be used to explore psycholinguistic theories. We will also design, run, and analyze an experiment to help understand the practical aspects of psycholinguistic research.
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For international graduate students who are non-native speakers of English. The aim of the class is to develop greater fluency and comprehensibility in conversation; the course can also serve as helpful preparation for oral proficiency exams, professional presentation, and teaching assistant assignments.
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For NU international graduate students who are non-native speakers of English, this course focuses on written argumentation skills and all aspects of academic writing. The class is tailored to the particular skills and needs of the students enrolled at the time, and work on assignments for other classes, research papers, and thesis chapters is incorporated into the class plan.
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This course covers topics in acoustic phonetics and speech perception. In the first half of the course, the acoustic theory of speech production is introduced and the acoustic correlates of speech sounds are presented. We also cover acoustic-phonetic features of connected speech. In the second half of the course, we turn our attention to the perception of speech signals. We address such topics as phonetic categorization, speech perception and linguistic experience, and the role of speech perception in phonology.
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Like all areas of linguistics, the study of meaning has undergone important new developments thanks to the availability of large datasets and sophisticated statistical analysis methods. Historically rooted in corpus linguistics, machine learning and information retrieval, this new paradigm is now being applied in such diverse disciplines as Linguistics, Psychology, Education, Political Science, Sociology, and Anthropology. This course is a hands-on guide to techniques commonly used in text classification, content analysis, and similar tasks, including but not limited to Naive Bayes, Latent Semantic Analysis and Support Vector Machines. Following an introduction to the conceptual and mathematical basics, we will discuss a variety of recent results in different areas while students are working in small groups on projects of their own choice. Depending on background and interests, these projects will either use off-the-shelf software to address questions pertaining to students' own research area, or evaluate extensions and refinements of the underlying algorithms. Although the course has no formal prerequisites, some background in linguistics (equivalent to 200-level courses) and/or computer literacy and familiarity with computational linguistics (e.g., as covered in Ling 334 in the Winter quarter) is desirable.
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Experimental pragmatics is an approach to the study of language use that combines theories and concepts from linguistic pragmatics and the philosophy of language with the empirical methods of experimental psycholinguistics. In this seminar, we will discuss both theoretical and experimental work relevant to this field. Specific topics to be covered include: reference resolution, implicature, the semantic-pragmatics boundary, indirect speech acts, inference, coherence, and figurative language. Students will be expected to read and discuss several chapters and articles each week, and will be evaluated on a combination of class participation, project presentations, and written research reports.
Score: 12.415997 Details | Listing | Web page
Introduction to extra-semantic meaning, focusing on the role of context in utterance production and interpretation. Topics include the semantics-pragmatics boundary, implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and information structure.
Score: 12.415997 Details | Listing | Web page
Linguistics 250 is an introduction to the sound structure of language. We will learn to describe speech sounds in the three domains of speech: the articulatory domain (how speech sounds are produced in the human vocal tract), the acoustic domain (their form in the acoustic medium), and the perceptual domain (how listeners process the incoming speech signal). We will learn to recognize the ways in which speech sounds pattern in language to convey meaning, and the ways in which these patterns are similar and different across the languages of the world. This course will focus on the sound structure of English; however, we will also explore the sound structure of other languages. Students will have the opportunity to analyze their own speech using state-of-the-art acoustic digital signal processing software.
Score: 12.415997 Details | Listing | Web page
People use languages like English to convey information. What makes a language, superficially no more than a bunch of noises or strings, suitable for this purpose, and how does it work? This question is at the center of the study of language meaning. In this course we will consider questions like these: How do the meanings of words like "everyone," "a," "hit," and "saw," give rise to the similarities and differences between "Everyone saw a hit," "Everyone hit a saw," "A saw hit everyone," etc.? Can we always tell for sure what a given sentence means, and does it mean the same on all occasions? Is meaning something that a language has or something people do with it? What's the place of meaning in the overall theory of language? We will explore a variety of approaches to these questions and discuss their theoretical premises, methodological tools, and empirical strengths and weaknesses.
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Computers and the theoretical concept of "computation" play an integral part in linguistic theory and research. This course provides a hands-on introduction to the computational tools used in empirical linguistic analysis and the computational concepts used to understand the structure of language. Topics include: how to use and develop automated methods for processing large language databases and other sources of linguistic data; computational approaches to language analysis; and computational modeling of human language processing. Programming skills are neither assumed nor required.
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The primary goal of this course is to provide an introduction to the theory and practice of Russian phonology and morphology. An increased understanding of the sound system (phonology and phonetics) and word-structure (morphology) and the interaction of sounds and word-structure (morphophonemics) of Russian, together with an awareness of the issues relevant in their description, will improve the student's grasp of the language, both as a practical communicative medium and as a linguistic system in and of itself. The study of Russian phonology, phonetics morphology, and morphophonemics will be the main focus of the quarter. If there is remaining time, then we will explore other significant and interesting topics pertaining to the structure of Russian, such as, questions related to foreign borrowings, forms of address, gender of nouns, pragmatics, sentence intonation, etc.
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An interdisciplinary investigation of reference from a linguistic/cognitive perspective, with the goal of explaining how speakers are able to refer to the same object in real time using different linguistic expressions (or even different languages), and how the same linguistic expression can be used to refer to different objects on different occasions. More generally, theories of reference attempt to answer the question: how do we acquire knowledge of the world through language and, relatedly, what is the nature of the relationship between language and reality? Specific topics to be covered include: (in)definiteness, deixis, the referential/attributive distinction, generics, deferred reference, and anaphora.
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