Past and Present LING 530 Courses

Discover LING 530 courses, topics, and instructors offered in the Department of Linguistics.

Availability for specific topics and sections will vary each year depending on the instructor.

 

2024 – 2025

LING 530R: Cross-linguistic Mutual Influence in Phonetics and Phonology- Molly Babel 

It is well-established empirically that the languages any individual knows are subject to crosslinguistic mutual influence. That is, for a bilingual individual, an individual’s L1 influences their L2 and their L2 influences their L1. To what extent this influence is a matter of representations and/or processes (e.g., what we often think of as psycholinguistic processes like lexical access or production planning) is not sufficiently theorized. In this course, we will (1) overview the state of the field with respect to what is known about crosslinguistic mutual influence in sound and sound structures; (2) chart out the gaps in the empirical space; (3) understand current theoretical approaches; and (4) flesh out where current theory falls short. While the readings for this course will be focused on the phonetics and phonology of auditory-vocal languages, students interested in other language modalities and/or other levels of representation are more than welcome and readings will be selected to address the interests of such students.

LING 530A: Mood and Sentence Types- Ryan Bochnak

The notion of “mood” in linguistics is typically taken to relate to two different phenomena: verbal mood, which subsumes notions such as indicative and subjunctive; and sentence mood, which relates to sentence types such as declarative, interrogative and imperative (Portner 2018). Most researchers investigating mood focus on one of these two sub-types, and therefore theories of verbal and sentence mood have developed separately from one another. In this seminar, we will review recent literature on both sub-types of mood, with an eye towards how these seemingly independent systems might share a unified core. Topics covered include but may not be limited to: subjunctives, realis/irrealis systems; interrogatives and questioning speech acts; imperatives and directive speech acts; exclamatives. Throughout, we will explore cross-linguistic views on these phenomena and become exposed to various discourse models. Although the focus of this seminar will be the semantics and pragmatics literature, students interested in syntactic, morphological or philosophical approaches are also encouraged to attend and suggest topics and readings.

 

LING 530C: Clitics: a View from the Pacific Northwest- Henry Davis

Clitics have long constituted a problematic piece in the grammatical jigsaw. They are often described as elements which are syntactically independent but phonologically dependent, but this description greatly oversimplifies their behavior. They persistently appear in positions where they shouldn’t, violating otherwise well-motivated principles of syntactic constituency and dependency, and show equally distinctive phonological properties, for example by forming prosodic constituents with each other rather than their hosts. Furthermore, they have resisted repeated attempts to reduce their special properties to syntax (via movement or binding), phonology (via an appeal to their defective prosody) or a combination of the two (e.g., via prosodically driven movement). In this course, we’ll take a long hard look at clitics specifically through the lens of the indigenous languages of Northwest North America, which have some of the most extensive and theoretically challenging clitic systems in the world. Precisely because clitics occupy an interstitial space between the major components of the grammar, this course should be of interest to students working in phonology, morphology, syntax, or any combination thereof, as well as anyone interested in Indigenous languages of the northwest (including languages of the Salish, Tsimshianic, and Wakashan families).

2023 – 2024

LING 530O: The Language(s) of Stories- Hotze Rullmann

The ability to tell and interpret stories is central to the human experience. Story-telling is, presumably, common to all languages and cultures. Narrative discourse occurs in a wide variety of genres, including not only literary fiction (novels and short stories) but also oral narratives, myths, legends, epic poetry, historiography, (auto)biography, and even jokes, and of course also in the visual modality (e.g., film and comic strips).
In this seminar course, we will explore some of the linguistic mechanisms involved in story-telling. These include tense and aspect (for instance, the perfect-imperfect distinction and the “historical present”), modality and evidentiality, deixis, quotation, clause-typing, obviation, logophoricity, etc. These formal linguistic devices all contribute to the internal structuring of stories, and help to convey the important but elusive notion of narrative point-of-view -- the sense that a story may be told as if viewed “through the eyes” of one or more of the characters.
One of the central concerns of the course will be the phenomenon of Free Indirect Discourse (FID). This is a narrative style that appears to mix elements of direct and indirect discourse, and conveys a strong sense of being “inside the head” of the main character. FID raises profound questions about the representation of “other minds”, point-of-view, deixis, context, and quotation, among other issues. Although it is often viewed as a strictly literary phenomenon, FID frequently occurs in less formal styles as well, including oral narration. How widely FID, or something like it, is distributed cross-linguistically is still an open question, and one which I am eager to explore with participants in the seminar.
The linguistic mechanisms involved in story-telling play an important role in compositional sentence-internal semantics as well. Usually linguists start by analyzing the contribution of such devices at the sentence level, and then try to extrapolate to their role in structuring stories. In this course we will often turn the question around: What can we learn from the inter-sentential semantics of linguistic elements in narrative discourse that may provide insights into their intra-sentential functioning?
While the course will approach narrative linguistic devices mainly within the framework(s) of theoretical linguistics (formal semantics, pragmatics, and syntax), we will also consider interdisciplinary perspectives from fields such as literary studies, narratology, the philosophy of language, and cognitive science. Students from any of these areas are welcome to take the course. We may also make forays into visual modalities of story-telling by looking at recent attempts to extend the tools of formal semantics to the analysis of pictorial representations, such as comic strips (so-called “super semantics”).
Although much of the literature on narrative discourse focuses on English and a few closely related languages, one of the goals of the seminar is to expand the horizons by looking at the linguistics of story telling in languages from other families and areas of the world. Students are encouraged to pursue empirical and theoretical research on any language of their choice.

 

LING 530Q: Cross-linguistic Pragmatics- Lisa Matthewson

In this course we will read and discuss papers on formal pragmatics in any language except English. The goals are to expand our empirical understanding of pragmatic phenomena such as implicature, presupposition, information structure and discourse management, and to think about issues of universality and cross-linguistic variation in pragmatics.
Students will have flexibility in how they satisfy the course requirements for this class. Some options, from which one or more can be chosen in consultation with the instructor, include: writing a research paper on a pragmatic topic in a language other than English; leading class discussions of primary literature; presenting their own research to the class; providing peer feedback; designing a fieldwork or experimental investigation and/or creating stimuli for investigating pragmatic topics (e.g., storyboards).

LING 530P: Phonetics and Phonology of Sign Languages- Kathleen Hall

In this course, we will explore how phonetics and phonology are studied in relation to sign languages. Sign languages of course involve a different modality than spoken languages — they are visual / gestural rather than auditory / vocal. While this means that we can’t literally study the “sounds” of such languages, we can still study the smallest non-meaningful units that form their structure, and that is the sense in which we can study their phonetics and phonology. For example, instead of talking about the place, manner, and voicing of consonant sounds, we might talk about the location, movement, and handshape involved in producing a sign. And as it turns out, many of the phonological processes common in spoken languages also show up in sign languages, such as assimilation, neutralization, reduction, deletion, or metathesis. Such observations give us insight into which characteristics of languages are universal and which are modality- or language-specific.
We will examine the ways in which linguists describe and analyze these components of sign languages, reading both general overview articles and more narrowly focused research papers. We will compare different theoretical approaches to particular issues and discuss their relative merits. Students will be involved in an original project in relation to the topics covered in the course.
No prior knowledge of any sign language is assumed.

2022 – 2023

530ASociophonetic Investigations of Understudied Varieties and Languages: Perspectives, Methods and Theories -Amanda Cardoso

Sociophonetics was built around a small number of relatively unrepresentative languages (e.g., English), which influences the theories and methods that are used and the perspectives shown. This course is a discussion-based precisely focussing on the scant sociophonetic investigations involving understudied and underrepresented varieties and languages. We will do this in order to test current theoretical claims and assess methodological tools keeping in mind a wider range of language and social contexts. This will help us to better understand sociophonetics across the world’s diverse linguistic and social landscape. We further examine how the sociophonetic foundations influence the types of research and perspectives that are found in the field. A term-based hands-on project on a topic of your choice, relevant to the course content, will allow you to explore these questions further.

530G: Python Programming - Fatemeh Salehian Kia

The goal of this course is to teach programming concepts using the Python programming language. The course is designed to be self-standing and proceeds from basic to medium- and advanced concepts and assumes no prior programming experience. For an IT professional, programming skills are almost indispensable: General understanding of programming and programming experience both improve students’ overall understanding of information systems and help develop their general problem solving skills. Programming skills are also essential for analysis and mining of information users’ behaviors and communities. Good programming skills significantly boost work productivity and students usually utilize them during their program of study and throughout their professional lives.

This course is cross-listed with LIBR 559C

530N: Machine Learning for Linguists - Miikka Silfverberg

This course will introduce the field of machine learning, i.e. the study of algorithms which learn from data. The emphasis of the course will be on applications of machine learning to linguistic problems and language data. The aim is to give students a working knowledge of fundamental machine learning concepts and techniques. Students will learn how to set up machine learning experiments, how to evaluate the performance of various machine learning algorithms and how to analyze the outcome of experiments.
The course has a sizable practical programming component; together, we will implement many popular machine learning algorithms and learn how to apply machine learning algorithms from existing Python programming libraries. At the end of the course, students will complete an independent programming project. Students should have knowledge of the Python programming language (LING530G Python Programming or equivalent). Knowledge in calculus, probabilities and statistics will be helpful but is not required.

530B: The Grammar of Numbers and Numeral Expressions- Marcin Morzycki

Numerals have been a topic of semantic research in part because they are at the crossroads of well-studied issues like quantification, plurality, adjectival modification, scales, and implicature. It's therefore slightly distressing that various essential questions remain unanswered or unsettled, and in a few cases, arguably virtually unasked. That's especially the case with respect to less well-studied languages.
The aim of this seminar will be to examine the grammar of numerals with an eye toward bringing novel data into the picture, and toward asking questions that might bring it out. Among these: How does the grammar of arithmetic language and mathematical expressions work, even in familiar languages? The ability to express large numbers is not a linguistic universal. What are the semantic consequences of this fact? No one acquires numerals and mathematical expressions without first acquiring concepts that require explicit instruction. Might this mean that the associated linguistic phenomena have a different theoretical status? How does the language of probability and odds (e.g. '3 to 1') work? What does this tell us about measurement and dimensions? How do languages vary with respect to numerals? What do numeral modifiers (e.g. 'at least 4', 'more than 3') tell us reveal? In smaller languages, counting and related notions are often expressed by code-switching into a distinct language of education. How can we cope with this methodological challenge, and does it actually present some special opportunities? How do especially recent numerals like 'zero' work across languages? What about adjectives conceptually and historically linked to numerals, like 'single', 'dual', 'only', and 'sole'? In what ways do numerals interact with special flavors of pluralities, such as groups? How do ordinal numerals like 'third' work? Can mathematical language serve as a proving ground for exploring broader questions about recursion and language complexity?

530K: (Psycho)linguistic methods in eye tracking-Cris Hammerly

Our eye movement behaviours provide one of the best windows into the inner workings of our mind. The goal of this course is to introduce the ins and outs of how eye tracking methods are used to understand our linguistic abilities, including pupillometry, eye tracking while reading, and visual world, in a variety of linguistic subfields and contexts (i.e. both inside and outside the lab). Besides understanding the method, we will also look at explicit models of reading and eye movement control in a variety of orthographic scripts and languages. The course will be hands on: Students will conceptualize, design, pilot, and analyze data from their own eye tracking study developed over the course of the term (we will decide as a class whether we do this as a group or individually). No previous experience in eye tracking, experiments, or data analysis is necessary.

2021 – 2022

530G: Python Programming — Muhammad Abdul-Mageed

The goal of this course is to introduce programming concepts using the Python programming language. The course is designed to be self-standing and focuses on basic concepts, assuming no prior programming experience. For an IT professional, programming skills are almost indispensable: General understanding of programming and programming experience both improve students’ overall understanding of information systems and help develop their general problem
solving skills. Programming skills are also essential for analysis and mining of information users’ behaviors and communities. Good programming skills significantly boost work productivity and students usually utilize them during their program of study and throughout their professional lives.

530J:  Machine Learning for Linguists — Garrett Nicolai

530L: Semantics and Pragmatics of Polar Questions — Lisa Matthewson

530J:  Machine Learning for Linguists — Miikka Silfverberg

2020 – 2021

530G: Python Programming — Muhammad Abdul-Mageed

The goal of this course is to introduce programming concepts using the Python programming language. The course is designed to be self-standing and focuses on basic concepts, assuming no prior programming experience. For an IT professional, programming skills are almost indispensable: General understanding of programming and programming experience both improve students’ overall understanding of information systems and help develop their general problem solving skills. Programming skills are also essential for analysis and mining of information users’ behaviors and communities. Good programming skills significantly boost work productivity and students usually utilize them during their program of study and throughout their professional lives.

530H: Theories and Analysis in Sociophonetics  — Amanda Cardoso

In this course, we will be exploring a number of topics in sociophonetics, putting “people” and phonetics together by looking at three areas where society, production and perception are intertwined: Attitudes and Biases, Language Variation, and Language Contact and Change. Through these topics we will explore a variety of questions about the way that people interact with each other and how this relates to production and perception of their languages.

530I: Linguistic Problems in a Special Area  — Hotze Rullmann

The goal of this seminar is an exploration of a broad range of interrelated topics, including negation and polarity, questions, alternative semantics for focus and focus particles, and scales. Participants are encouraged to do projects on topics of their own choosing within this general area. I am also open to any requests for covering specific topics.

530K: Sensing Syntax — Rose-Marie Dechaine

2019 – 2020

530F: Sign Language Phonetics & PhonologyKathleen Currie Hall

In this course, we will explore how phonetics and phonology are studied in relation to sign languages. Sign languages of course involve a different modality than spoken languages — they are visual / gestural rather than auditory / vocal. While this means that we can’t literally study the “sounds” of such languages, we can still study the smallest non-meaningful units that form their structure, and that is the sense in which we can study their phonetics and phonology. For example, instead of talking about the place, manner, and voicing of consonant sounds, we might talk about the location, movement, and handshape involved in producing a sign. And as it turns out, many of the phonological processes common in spoken languages also show up in sign languages, such as assimilation, neutralization, reduction, deletion, or metathesis. Such observations give us insight into which characteristics of languages are universal and which are modality- or language-specific.

We will examine the ways in which linguists describe and analyze these components of sign languages, reading both general overview articles and more narrowly focused research papers. We will compare different theoretical approaches to particular issues and discuss their relative merits. There will be a particular focus on the lexical processing of phonological characteristics of signed languages. Students will be involved in an original research project in relation to the topics covered in the course.

No prior knowledge of any sign language is assumed.

530B: Clausal complementation at the syntax-semantics interface –Neda Todorovic

This course explores the interaction between syntax and semantics in the domain of clausal complementation. In particular, it tries to describe how structural relations established between the matrix verb and its clausal complement affect the obtained interpretation, as well as what the interpretational requirements imposed by the matrix verb tell us about the syntactic constellation of its complement. Some of the topics covered in this course will revolve around the following questions: Do clausal complements of all verbs come in same, CP-sizes? What dictates the size of the complement – do different languages follow the same size patterns? What is finiteness (especially in languages without tense)? What exactly are syntactic and semantics differences between finite and non-finite complements in one language and cross-linguistically? How does the complement structure affect cross-clausal syntactic operations (e.g. clitic climbing, wh-movement, NPI-licensing), complement’s temporal interpretation, the availability of shifted indexicals, among others.

The course will integrate my own research with the existing explorations in this domain, and it will be heavily guided by what people attending the seminar are interested in. The idea is to look into a number of different languages and see what parallelism can be established in this domain.

While the course is mostly about syntax-semantic interface, it is impossible not to touch on phonology, morphology and pragmatics of these clauses—please join us and teach us something we don’t know yet!

530A: Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing – Muhammad Abdul-Mageed

2018 – 2019

530A: The Sound Pattern of Icelandic –Gunnar Hansson

This seminar will explore the sound system of Icelandic, broadly construed: its phonetics and phonology, and the phonology-phonetics and phonology-morphology interfaces. The main focus will be on those aspects of the Icelandic sound system that are typologically unusual, of special theoretical interest, or lend themselves to methodological approaches (e.g. experimental or computational/corpus-based) that have not previously been applied. A small sample of phenomena of potential interest includes: preaspirated stops, short (monomoraic) diphthongs, voiceless sonorants, prestopped nasals and laterals, excrescent stops, and various other segmental alternations (umlaut, hardening, vowel epenthesis/syncope, cluster simplification, diphthongization, palatalization, deaspiration, and more). Many of these sound patterns interact with inflectional and derivational morphology, giving rise to intriguing interface effects: paradigm gaps, phonologically-conditioned allomorphy, levelling (paradigm uniformity), and probabilistic correlations between stem shape and inflectional class, to name a few. Students will pursue original research projects, individually and/or in groups.

530F: Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning–Muhammad Abdul-Mageed

Natural language processing (NLP)is the field focused at teaching computers to understand and generate human language. Dialog systems where the computer interacts with humans, such as the Amazon Echo, constitute an instance of both language understanding and generation, as the machine attempts to identify the meaning of questions and generate meaningful answers. Recent advances in machine learning, especially in Deep learning, a class of machine learning methods inspired by information processing in the human brain, have boosted performance on several NLP tasks. Deep learning of natural language is in its infancy, with expected breakthroughs ahead. Solving NLP problems directly contributes to the development of pervasive technologies with significant social and economic impacts and the potential to enhance the lives of millions of people. Given the central role that language plays in our lives, advances in deep learning of natural language have implications across almost all fields of science and technology, as well as many other disciplines like linguistics, as NLP and deep learning are instrumental for making sense of the ever-growing data collected in these fields. This course provides a graduate-level introduction to Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning. The goal of the course is to familiarize students with the major NLP problems and the primary deep learning methods being developed to solve them. This includes problems at various linguistic levels (e.g., word and sub-word, phrase, clause, and discourse). Methodologically, this involves unsupervised, distributed representations and supervised deep learning methods across these linguistic levels. The course also includes providing an introductory level of hands-on experience in using deep learning software as well as opportunities to develop advanced solutions for NLP problems in the context of a final project.

530B: Sociolinguistics in Social MediaJulian Brooke

This is a project class focused on corpus linguistics in general, and sociolinguistic analysis of social media in particular. We will review the growing body of relevant research from linguistics, computer science, and psychology, and students are expected to formulate novel research hypotheses involving one or more sociolinguistic factors (e.g. gender, age, social background, etc.) and linguistic variables which can be identified with minimal human intervention. Using the Python programming language, each student will collect appropriate documents from the internet, process the data, and carry out a statistical analysis, employing machine learning models where appropriate.

Prerequisite: LING 447G – Python for Linguists. For questions about registering in this course, please contact Will Sarmiento.

2017 – 2018

530: Embodied Phonetics–Bryan Gick

While all theories of speech behavior must ultimately incorporate the body, modeling bodies has not been a prominent program in phonetics research. Our goal in this course will be to explore how understanding bodies can (must?) underpin and influence our models of spoken language. Part of the evaluation for the course will be a single group research project relevant to the topic.

2016 – 2017

530A: Investigating Information Structure: theoretical and methodological perspectivesHenry Davis & Michael Rochemont

Information Structure (IS) is relevant to every area of linguistic investigation. It finds expression in natural language in intonational and segmental phonology, and in morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The last couple of decades have seen an explosion of work on its ramifications for theoretical and experimental research in the phonetics/phonology, phonology/syntax, syntax/semantics, and semantics/pragmatics interfaces, and in areas as diverse as field work, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics (L1 and L2 acquisition and processing), L2 pedagogy, language disorders, historical linguistics, computational linguistics, and neurobiology. In this course, we investigate the central theoretical notions of IS (focus, givenness and topic), with a special emphasis on the methodological issues that they give rise to in both experimental and fieldwork contexts. For example, how do we go about establishing IS generalizations in an understudied language with few and often elderly speakers? What constitutes sufficient evidence for an IS generalization? How much context is enough? Can we investigate the syntax and semantics of IS without examining its phonological and phonetic effects, and vice-versa?

530B: Alternation: exploring the morphology-­phonology borderlandsGunnar Hansson & Doug Pulleyblank

Our focus of attention in this graduate seminar is alternations, their analysis, and how they figure in the demarcation and division of labour between morphology and phonology and in models of the interface between these two components of grammar.

What counts as genuine “phonological” alternation vs. something else (“just morphology”, “allomorphy”, “listed exceptions”, “inflectional classes”)? Is this a linguistically valid distinction? What are the relevant criteria?

  • productivity, frequency, generality?
  • phonological conditioning?
  • limitation to particular sets of lexical items or morphological constructions?
  • phonological naturalness (non­arbitrariness)?
  • parallels with phonotactic generalizations (surface­trueness)?

We will approach these topics from different perspectives, considering for example their implications for issues of representational complexity and abstractness, learnability, lexical representation and storage, etc. Drawing on a variety of morphophonological phenomena (e.g. exceptionality, derived environment effects, non­concatenative exponence, prosodic morphology, reference to domains or boundaries) and types of alternation (assimilation, epenthesis, polarity, etc.), we will examine these in the light of different theoretical models of phonology and morphosyntax and the interface between these components of grammar.

2015 – 2016

530A: The Shifting Nature of an Individual’s Speech-sound System Across the Life Span  Joe Stemberger & Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson

Language acquisition is often thought of as a succession of states, conceptualized from the perspective of an end-state adult language. The earliest period in an individual’s speech-sound system has been addressed by different approaches concerning the nature of theinnate mechanisms which support language acquisition (or is it language learning? or language development?).
Research across the entire life span often presupposes a modular system, with strong limitations on the role of other aspects of human communication (such as morphosyntax, or even between different aspects of the speech-sound system if divided into phonology, a part of language, and phonetics, a part of speech), to say nothing about other aspects of cognition (such as memory, attention, non-verbal communication, and other types of motion). But is it even reasonable to talk about “the” adult system as a commodity to be acquired, as if it were static and unchanging (across decades of life, or even across a few minutes)? This course will address how our speech-sound systems wander as we travel through the course of our lives, in all their variability across individuals, and changes within the individual and the language across time. We address speech sound systems in typically or atypically developing or developed infants, children, young adults, mature adults, and well-aged adults; with intact or compromised motor, perceptual, and neural systems; engaged in language or other activities.

530B: Acquisition of Meaning: Theory and practice — Carla Hudson Kam & Lisa Matthewson

This course will explore how children learn what morphemes mean. For practical reasons, we will focus on English meanings, but students are invited to think about how learning might work in other linguistic and cultural contexts. We will start by considering ‘easy’ meanings like those encoded by count nouns, progressing through more opaque meanings and ending by considering tense and aspect. We will consider the formal analysis of meanings, the nature of the input children get from which they must learn meanings, and what we know about how children do (or do not) use the information available. The course will culminate in a joint research project, looking at the input in children’s picture books that may aid in the learning of tense and aspect. Students will be involved in developing the coding scheme and analyses, and we will complete a draft of a paper by the end of the course.

2014 – 2015

530A: Attention & Salience in Phonetics & Phonology — Molly Babel & Kathleen Currie Hall

This seminar addresses the topics of attention and salience in phonetics and phonology. Many researchers appeal to these concepts as explanatory factors in understanding linguistic processing, variation, and change. We will explore how these concepts are defined, operationalized, and quantified, and examine how they relate to other potentially fuzzy concepts such as similarity, confusability, phonetic “cues,” prominence, markedness, and expectation. Special focus will be paid to how salience and attention affect phonological patterns, the grammaticalization of phonological patterns over time, variability (dialect contact, loanword phonology, “special” populations), and acquisition. The course will assume the situation of language as part of a large, relatively broadly defined communicative system.

530B:Grammar of Discourse — Lisa Matthewson & Martina Wiltschko

Traditionally, semantics concerns itself with generating the truth conditions of sentences, and syntax concerns itself with generating grammatically well-formed sentences. In this course we will explore how we can go beyond these narrow confines to reflect and encode properties of the discourse context, including the knowledge states of the interlocutors. We will do so by investigating phenomena from familiar and unfamiliar languages. Students are encouraged to contribute relevant data from languages of their choice and will conduct both individual and joint original research on topics related to the course material.

2013 – 2014

530A: Number & Quantification — Henry Davis & Hotze Rullmann

For a long time now, the standard approach to the semantics of noun phrases has been in terms of generalized quantifiers (GQ’s) and Quantifier Raising (QR). However, over the years it has become increasingly clear that true GQ’s are actually quite rare cross-linguistically (and even in English), and that the phenomenon of scope is far too varied to be captured by a single mechanism like QR. Several alternative approaches have been developed in which many types of noun phrases are something other than GQ’s, and in which QR is replaced by a variety of different devices (such as choice functions). Central to this development has been the realization that the category of number is a crucial factor in understanding the semantics of nominals. Number is semantically far more complex and interesting than suggested by the deceptively simple opposition between singular and plural found in the morphosyntax of languages like English. There is a lot of crosslinguistic variation in the expression of number, and number is tied up closely not just with quantification and scope, but also with phenomena such as the mass/count distinction, aspect, and genericity. By moving beyond the classical GQ-based theories, the field has thus arrived at a much richer and more detailed understanding of nominal semantics, which is also much more appropriate and productive for the empirical study of natural languages. The goal of this course is to introduce students to the diverse and versatile theoretical toolkit that is currently available, and to apply it to the analysis of empirical phenomena in their language(s) of choice.

530B: Language & Gesture — Rose-Marie Déchaine & Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson

This is an exploratory seminar that looks at how speech and gesture are yoked. We will look at two countervailing conceptions of gesture: gesture as autonomous from language (McNeill, Kendon) versus gesture as an integral part of language (Bolinger). With this as backdrop, seminar participants will design and engage in collaborative research projects that treat any aspect of gesture writ large.

2012 – 2013

530A: Linearization & Interpretation — Michael Rochemont & Martina Wiltschko

The goal of this course is to explore the relation between linearization and interpretation. By linearization, we mean the relative order of words and phrases in sentences as well as the order of morphemes in words. By interpretation we mean truth-conditional (semantic) and non-truth-conditional (pragmatic) meaning. Linearization includes not only displacement (e.g., topicalization) but also base-generation. For example, German particles are interpreted in different ways depending on their position in the clause. The same thing is true of adverbs.

Determinants of morpheme and word order are not limited to grammar internal considerations such as case and selection, but they also include the following:

  1. scope
  2. information structure
  3. processing
  4. syntax-phonology mapping

We will approach the issue through examination of individual case-studies which will be conducted by the instructors (who will present their ongoing research) and by the students (who will develop their own research projects). Possible topics include left and right dislocations, topicalization, scrambling, discourse particles, adverb placement, free word order and disconfigurational languages.

530B: Tone  Kathleen Currie Hall & Doug Pulleyblank

This course examines phonological properties of tone systems. Contrastive tone occurs in 60-70 percent of the world’s languages. We examine a range of languages and properties, including languages differing typologically, genetically and geographically, looking at tone systems ranging from complex, densely specified systems to “accentual” systems with sparse tonal specifications. Theoretically the course considers various approaches, including autosegmental, metrical, and optimality-theoretic treatments. Attention will be paid to the ways in which tonal properties may be understood in light of the communicative function of language and modeled using information-theoretic approaches to linguistics.