The era of Big Data offers historical linguistics new roles, new possibilities, and urgent priorities. This course uses these new developments to draw up a linguistic prehistory and early history of the western Eurasian steppe and its periphery, in particular situating Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic, indigenous Caucasian languages, and their ancestor(s) in space, time, and areal-typological context.

The study of linguistic variation in American English (and other languages spoken in the United States) is changing dramatically today. This course will introduce patterns of variation and change in American English, covering sound patterns (vowels and consonants), word forms and sentence structures in their social, historical and regional contexts. We will situate these patterns in current linguistic theory, not only sociolinguistics and language change but also more broadly.

This course introduces concepts in corpus development that help the data to be reused by the creator or by others and to be archived and adapted for larger, comparative studies which may range over geographical space or time to permit the analysis of linguistic change in real time. The course will address the importance of robust collection, the coding and storage of specific demographic, situational and attitudinal metadata and reusable annotation as well as practical issues such as preparing for Institutional Review Board oversight to permit data sharing among linguists.

The goal of this course is to provide students with broad training in the nomenclature, theory, and practice of articulatory phonetics. Students in this course will learn about the organs of the vocal tract used in speech production, the muscles controlling them, and their coordination. We will also discuss factors thought to affect speech articulation, including speaker-internal factors (e.g. aerodynamics, coarticulation, speech rate), speaker-external factors (e.g. social information), as well as other factors, such as syllable structure and prosody.

With the availability of large corpora and the increased computational power that has enabled their efficient processing, modern lexicography has undergone a revolution. Statistical techniques, now central to lexicography, enable lexicographers to produce higher-quality dictionaries at lower cost. This course introduces modern corpus lexicography, with a focus on monolingual dictionaries, using English as an exemplar. We discuss the need for large corpora, how to build them, and the key statistical corpus methods used in modern lexicography.

This course teaches foundational concepts in computer science and mathematical linguistics as they apply to phonology. This material is related to rule-based and constraint-based theories of phonology including several varieties of SPE and OT including harmonic grammar. The course has two main foci. First, it will show how computational analysis allows the expressive power of the theories to be compared. Second, it will show how computational analysis can make significant inroads on problems relating to learning phonological patterns from data.

The emerging field of experimental pragmatics combines an interest in the theoretical complexities of language use with the experimental methodologies of psycholinguistics. This course will present a broad survey of recent work in this area that has attempted to apply the methods of experimental psychology to classic issues in theoretical pragmatics. Each class session will include both theoretical and experimental readings on topics such as reference, implicature, and speech acts.

This course provides an introduction to linguistic field methods. Working with a speaker of a language that the class does not know, we will attempt to determine as much as possible about the structure of the languages, including the phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic systems. This will be done using a variety of structured elicitation techniques, with non-verbal prompts, and by analyzing texts that we will elicit from the speaker.

Classical, discrete representations (e.g., syntactic trees) have been the foundation for much of modern linguistic theory, providing key insights into the structure of linguistic knowledge and language processing. However, such frameworks fail to capture the gradient computational principles that underlie human cognition and behavior--not simply performance, but also our competence. 

The course has two goals. First, students will learn the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) model of intonational phonology and how to transcribe intonational tones and prosodic structure using the English ToBI transcription system, and second, students will be introduced to a model of prosodic typology which is based on intonational phonology of various languages described in the same AM framework.

This course introduces theoretical and methodological issues in the study of bilingualism. The first half of the course focuses on bilingual acquisition in early childhood. We examine how children develop two languages in families where they are exposed to dual input from birth. The issues covered include language differentiation, cross-linguistic influence and code-mixing in bilingual development. Data from the language development of children acquiring Chinese and English, as well as other language pairs will be used for illustration.

This course provides an overview of the main methods and algorithms used in computational linguistics, motivated by some examples of questions they can be used to investigate.  We will cover the basics of: information theory (entropy and mutual information), n-gram models (for computing the probabilities of phone or word sequences), finite-state automata and hidden Markov models, parsing algorithms, and distributional semantic models.  In addition to lectures, we will include some hands-on labs in Python to help students gain practical experience with some of these concepts.

Discourse is a focus of study in most of the humanities and social sciences, and discourse analysis is practiced in one way or another by anthropologists, communications scholars, linguists, literary critics, and sociologists, as well as rhetoricians.  Discourse analysts set out to answer a variety of questions about language, about writers and speakers, and about sociocultural processes that surround and give rise to discourse, but all approach their tasks by paying close and systematic attention to particular texts and their contexts.  We are all familiar with the informal discourse analy

In this basic course we will review common types of language change at every structural level: phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. We will also study how language relationships are determined, how subgroupings are justified, and how protolanguages are reconstructed. Where appropriate, we will talk about recent developments in historical linguistics that involve big data: for example, the use of text corpora in studies of syntactic change and use of lexical databases in the detection of language relationship.

This course addresses fundamental issues in developmental linguistics. We will examine data about children’s language acquisition through the lenses of learning and linguistic competence. Key topics to be covered include: The Poverty of the Stimulus and Universal Grammar; Associationist vs. hypothesis driven theories of learning; The role of direct, implicit and indirect negative evidence; Differences between input and intake; Bootstrapping theories and cross-domain inference; and, The role of extralinguistic cogntive and information capacities in language acquisition.

This survey course introduces non-clinical students to fundamental concepts of language disorders in pediatric and adult populations.  Characteristics of primary language impairment, aphasia, dysarthria, and hearing impairments, as well as articulation, fluency, and voice and other related disorders affecting language are among the topics to be discussed.  Diagnostic techniques and treatment strategies are also introduced. 

The course is concerned with some of the classical results in linguistic typology as well as a number of central topics of current research. The focus is on aspects of syntax and morphology, e.g. word order, syntactic functions, grammatical polysemy, and relative clauses. We will examine correlations between structural parameters and genealogical groups as well as geographical areas and will consider the crosslinguistic distribution of linguistic features in light of current usage-based theories of information processing, analogy, and social interaction.

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.

This course is an introduction to the theory and methods of phonological analysis. Each week we will focus on one of four main sets of theoretical assumptions: (1) representational assumptions about what phonological constituents are and what they consist of, (2) analytical assumptions about the kinds of evidence that are brought to bear on the question of the basic vs.