Linguistics

This course is designed to provide fieldwork experience in a classroom setting. Students learn to analyze a language that they do not know through hands-on experience. This is not a lecture course. It is a specialized advanced-level course that provides opportunities in the classroom to use techniques of language elicitation, and to gain practice in gathering and describing a language using only data from an informant who is a native speaker of the language. Imagine this situation. You survive a plane crash but you are trapped in an isolated mountain forest. You know neither the language nor the culture. The local people do not know yours. You start to learn language and customs. Your method is hands-on but systematic -- planning and keeping records with paper and pencil. In the social sciences, this activity is termed fieldwork. In each class students encounter and gather data from an informant or consultant who is an expert in the language they work with. Previous language analysis has been done with speakers of Twi, Yoruba, Tagalog, Dutch, Okinawan, Thai, and Russian, as well as with Deaf signers of ASL and JSL.

Fundamental importance is assigned to speakers' introspective judgments of sentence acceptability in syntactic research. However, such judgments can be gravely compromised by instability of different kinds, which calls into question the empirical reliability of such data. This course presents objective and practical methods to collect and analyze acceptability judgments. Topics include experimental design, data visualization, statistical analysis, and the application of experimental methods to theoretical questions. This is a hands-on course, and students are expected to lead discussions on primary research.

This course furthers knowledge of grammatical theorizing, building on introductory linguistics courses. It focuses on methodological rigor, and addresses language variation from a typological perspective. Morphological and syntactic research in the last decennia has convincingly proven that it is possible to explain language phenomena in a wide variety of languages with a limited set of abstract principles interacting in a way that one can describe as “unity in diversity”. This course shows how syntax (and morphology) provide on the one hand an instrument for the principles of scientific theorizing and scientific thought, while on the other hand, how one can apply these tools to address language variation, and can steer research in acquisition and psycholinguistics. In this course students learn how to apply the core principles in the morphology and syntax of natural language when analyzing diverse material from a range of language, using different empirical courses, including corpora, databases, grammars, etc.

This course is an introduction to the study of language, and language issues in the community. The course covers general features of language, such as the inevitability of language change and the importance of structure dependence. Students explore popular misconceptions about language, examining why they are erroneous.

This is a graduate level course that is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course is intended for students who have a strong background in linguistics. The course focuses on English linguistics and includes lectures and laboratory exercises that focus on metalinguistic factors in language use. The course concentrates on theoretical knowledge related to the following linguistic areas: phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicology, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, stylistics, corpus linguistics. The focus of the course is on actual language use, with authentic texts (written and/or spoken, belonging to different registers) and electronic language corpora used as examples. The course concentrated on three main areas: theoretical introduction to basic concepts of corpus linguistics; corpus concordances; analysis and construction of corpora with the support of computer programs. Topics of metalinguistic analysis covered in the seminar include: idiom vs. open choice, register and sociolinguistic variability. Examples are taken from: British National Corpus; Corpus of Contemporary American English; Corpus of Global Web-Based English. Concepts analyzed include: corpus, corpus linguistics, corpus based linguistics, corpus driven linguistics, concordance, collocation, colligation, semantic prosody, semantic preference and lexical priming, as well as their practical applications. Assessment in the course is based on a written midterm that covers the theory part of the course and an oral exam that covers the practical part of the course. These two exams make up 2/3 of the grade. The remaining 1/3 is based on the laboratory assignments.

This directed independent research course is for qualified students who have demonstrated academic rigor and curiosity towards a particular research topic. Independent research topics are approved by the CIEE Academic Coordinator and the home institution advisor, and must reflect a topic that is relevant to the location of studies. To be accepted into this course, students submit a structured proposal with topic of exploration, significance of research topic as it relates to the local culture, methodology, a literature review, and a schedule of research milestones. Upon research completion, students present their findings to a panel of academics.

This course covers the history and development of the French language from a linguistic perspective. It focuses on the phonological, morphological, and syntactical evolution of previous languages into today's standard French.

This course studies language as a cognitive system which interfaces with other subsystems of the mind. It examines the biological foundations of language and the nature of language competence from an evolutionary and developmental perspective. The ways in which language, thought, and culture interact are explored. Emphasis is placed on the principles and mechanisms that underlie speech perception, sentence processing, and discourse comprehension, as well as structural factors in language production.