Fall 2012
Course Information
- Time:
- MWTh, 10-10:50am [Block C]
- Location:
- Abelson-Bass-Yalem Physics 131
- Textbook:
- Contemporary Linguistics: an Introduction (2010),
6th edition, William O'Grady, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, and Janie Rees-Miller, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston
Supplementary required readings will be posted on our course LATTE site.
Professor
- Lotus Goldberg
- Email: lmgold AT brandeis DOT edu
- Office: Volen 134
- Office Hours:
- Tuesdays 11am-12pm, Thursdays 3-4pm
TA
-
TA name
- Office hours
Course description and objectives
Linguistics, in a broad sense, is a discipline that studies the general nature of human language, almost always with respect to some aspect of its structure. This course introduces what is called theoretical linguistics, in which we aim to understand what it is that a person knows when they know their native language (i.e. the language they began speaking when they first began to talk). We address questions such as what elements of structure are common to all languages; how, in what ways, and in what domains other elements vary; and why this should be so. These issues are studied from the perspective of generative grammar, an approach to the linguistic sciences that is widespread in its use and influence across much of North America, many parts of Europe, and elsewhere.
The study of linguistics is broken up into four basic sub - areas, and introducing each of these will form the bulk of the course s content: the study across the world s languages of sound traits and sound patterns (phonetics and phonology), of word structures (morphology), of sentence structures (syntax), and of meaning and its use in context (semantics and pragmatics). In this course, each of these four areas will be approached largely from a synchronic perspective, comparing the traits present in a broad range of languages currently spoken around the world. We will also reference major areas in which linguistics interfaces with other disciplines. These include computational linguistics, which involves computational uses of language ranging from search engines, speech recognition and synthesis, and machine - aided translation; sociolinguistics and dialectology; and language acquisition. And we will touch on issues of language evolution and change, and language endangerment, death, and revitalization. The majority of these tasks will be accomplished by working out solutions to sets of data from various languages of the world, involving sound, word, sentence, and/or meaning structure patterns -- during class lectures, in homework assignments, and on the midterm and final exams.
Schedule (subject to change)
| Week |
Topics Covered |
|---|---|
| 1 . . |
Course Introduction Reading: Pinker selection (on Latte) Textbook ch. 1, Language: A Preview |
| 2, 3,
4 |
Phonetics Reading: Textbook ch. 2, Phonetics: The Sounds of Language |
| 5,
6, 7, 8 |
Phonology Reading: Textbook ch. 3, Phonology: The Function and Patterning of Sounds |
| 9, 10 |
Phonology wrap-up; Midterm Review; beginning of Morphology Reading: Textbook ch. 4, Morphology: The Analysis of Word Structure |
| 11,
12, 13 |
Syntax Reading: None |
| 14, 15 |
Syntax wrap-up; Semantics and Pragmatics Reading: Selection from Saeed textbook (on Latte) |