Scheduled Linguistics Courses

Note: Any quarters beyond the next one are only scheduled tentatively.

Academic Year Fall 2011-Spring 2012

Course Descriptions

LING 201: Introduction to Linguistics Science (5 credits)
Survey of major subfields of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, language acquisitions, and sociolinguistics.

LING 204: Sociolinguistics (4 credits)
Examines the relationship between society and language, concentrating on the following areas: address forms, variation theory, language use, sociolinguistics and education, multilingualism, language policy and language attitudes.

LING 315: Phonology (4 credits)
Prereq: LING 201, 314 - Theory, methods and problems of phonological analysis and description.

LING 402: Morphology (4 credits)
Prereq: LING 201 - This course provides a thorough analysis of concepts and theories of word formation (morphology). It surveys patterns of English word formation, gradually introducing morphological structures from other languages. Throughout the course I use examples of morphological and syntactic patterns from languages radically different from English to illustrate the main points being covered. This should provide you with: 1) a solid introduction to all aspects of morphology and a basic understanding morphological theory; 2) a clearer understanding of syntactic concepts that may be encoded through morphological modification of bases; and 3) a firm grasp of how English word formation contrasts with other languages. I also hope that the material presented in the course will inspire you to study languages different than those with which you are now familiar.

LING 321: Syntax I (4 credits)
Prereq: LING 201 - This course is intended to help you understand how linguists think, and more specifically, to help you understand how to "think syntactically." Though this may seem rather silly as the topic of an entire course, understanding how to approach language scientifically is in fact extremely challenging. We are not trained to think about language in this particular way, but in order to "do linguistics" you must be able to examine and evaluate linguistic data, form hypotheses about that data, and construct theories with those hypotheses. This course is designed to teach you how to do that, step by step. We will apply what we learn about studying language scientifically to the syntactic structure of English and other languages, in order to discover some of the systematic rules that different linguistic systems.

LING 322: Syntax II (4 credits)

Advanced topics in theory, methods and problems of syntactic discription and analysis.

LING 314: Phonetics (4 credits)
Prereq: LING 201 - Introduction to phonetics as a science, its history and contributions. Emphasis is on the function of the mechanism and on the production, perception and transcription of speech sounds used in various languages.

LING 402: Topics in Linguistics (3-5 credits)
Prereq: LING 201 - Readings and/or directed research as determined by instructor. Variable topic. Repeatable.