This course focuses on a wide range of phenomena occurring under the heading of contact-induced morphological change and pursues three main goals:  first, to introduce the most recent developments in research on contact-induced morphological change; second, to make the students aware of and acquainted with the array of new data collected in recent publications; and, third, to lead them to a full understanding of how data from language contact informs the theory of morphology, in terms of the architecture of grammar.  

To what extent do the morphological and syntactic composition of words and phrases reflect the composition of their meanings? Do crosslinguistic differences in morphosyntax reflect differences in the primitives of semantic composition? Is there a uniform underlying syntactic representation for certain kinds of meanings across classes of lexeme introducing them and across languages? This class explores two contrasting views about the morphosyntax/semantics interface which make different predictions about the answers to such questions:

This course will survey morphologically conditioned phonology, focusing on the range of effects exhibited cross-linguistically as well as the range of effects that can occur within a given language. Topics of particular focus will include:  the relationship between morphophonologyand process morphology; interleaving between phonology and morphology; non-derived environment blocking; reduplication, and more.

This course explores the basic principles governing word structure and their interaction with phrasal and clausal syntax. Goals include: examining the evidence for taking morphemes to be syntactically independent units; introducing the mechanisms by which morphemes are combined and ordered, using the formal tools made available to us by Minimalist syntax and Distributed Morphology; and investigating cases in which syntactic structure and prosodic requirements conflict.

In a syntacticocentric morphology, morphological operations must obey what Koontz-Garboden (2010) called the Monotonicity Hypothesis: syntactic and semantic functors can be added, but not deleted, by morphological processes.

This course provides and overview of the field of sign language linguistics by looking at three sub-areas of sign language research that have contributed to our understanding of language more broadly over the last 50 years: (1) iconicity, meaning and morphology; (2) language evolution, language acquisition and language emergence; (3) the influence of communication modality on linguistic and neurophysiology.The essentials of sign language structure will be covered in the course lectures, and the supplemental readings provide more detail about the topics of sign language structure that figure

Karuk, a language isolate spoken in northern California, has a highly agglutinating morphology (and intricate morphophonological patterns) paired with free word order. This course will focus on topics in Karuk morphology, morphosyntax, and syntax that are especially interesting from the point of view of linguistic theory and typology. We will emphasize the use of a large corpus of morphologically tagged texts, from a variety of genres over a century of documentation, in doing primary analytic research on an endangered language with few remaining fluent speakers.

This course focuses on several topics in the complex morphology and nonconfigurational syntax of languages of the Algonquian family, including issues and controversies arising in the traditional analysis of the tripartite or bipartite verb stems, the syntactic role played by many of the derivational verbal suffixes, and recent syntactic analyses of Algonquian derivational morphology.  The course will also present the complex inflectional system of Algonquian verbs, including the controversial topic of inverse verbs, and an overview of word order issues (e.g.

This course will explore the use of statistical machine learning methods as a means to work on traditional scientific questions of linguistics. We will focus on the problems of word discovery, and inference of word-internal structure (morphology), and the interaction between morphology learning and inference of grammatical categories. We will explore the conditions under which such systems can be induced in the context of unsupervised learning.