Linguistics

This module is designed to help foreign students with their understating of Persian culture to improve their fluency, their comprehensibility, and their overall confidence. It helps students develop a competency in comprehending and producing Persian, as well as sociocultural competency in communicating with the people who speak or use it in meaningful ways. This module presents a basic understanding of the Persian language covering five skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and culture. It teaches students the Persian alphabet, basic sentence constructions in Persian, basics of Persian grammar, and vocabulary to be able to read basic texts and conduct basic everyday conversation.

This practical course provides a rapid tour of online experimental methods in the language sciences. Each week students cover a paper detailing a study using online methods, and work with code to implement a similar experiment. They also look at the main platforms for reaching paid participants, e.g. MTurk and Prolific, and discuss some of the challenges around data quality and the ethics of recruiting participants through those platforms.

This seminar deals with the linguistic subfield of syntax. Concepts and terms of syntactic analysis are introduced and applied to Romance languages. Students learn about different generative and usage-based syntax theories and analyze specific syntactic phenomena in detail. In addition to these basics, a main focus of the seminar is to work out the points of contact and interfaces of syntax with other areas of linguistics, such as morphology, semantics, information structure, and pragmatics.

This course explores how variation in language use relates to broader variation in the daily experiences of individuals and groups. It examines how language constructs cultural abstractions such as social class, gender, and power relations and how these abstractions play out in language varieties and shape their defining characteristics. 

This course provides the groundwork for understanding the shape and status of the English language. The course is divided between the study of the ways in which it has changed since the Old English period, and the study of the social and cultural contexts in which those changes have happened. Special attention is given to the emergence of key dialects and to the relations between English and other languages in the British Isles. Students also gain experience of a range of different varieties of English. 

This course provides an introduction to the existence of phonetic variation and change in modern English, as well as tools to detect and analyze this variation. Far from being a theoretical course on the major changes that took place in the history of English, this course focuses on language as can be directly accessed using recent and contemporary sources and tools. The first part of the course discusses how pronunciation was indicated in older dictionaries as objects of knowledge and culture, starting from 16th and 17th century books, and mainly focusing on 18th to 20th century dictionaries. The second part investigates how a collection of dictionaries from various periods can be used as a relevant corpus to identify and explain phonetic variation and change in present-day English as well as from a historical perspective, including the way new linguistic features can be born and spread through the language. The final part of the course demonstrates how to collect, annotate, and analyze oral English. It includes an introduction to the use of the speech analysis software PRAAT.

This course is intended for anyone interested in the two central themes of how languages work and how they change. The course covers: the basics of phonology (the sounds of a language) and morphology (analysis of the minimal meaningful elements in a language); the history of thought about language in the western tradition, from the ancient world to the 20th century; historical linguistics and the Indo-European languages; and sociolinguistics: how and why languages change.

This course studies the social function of language from a micro-linguistics point of view. Language is analyzed in relation to social structure. For example, we may casually say in our daily conversations that people in China speak Chinese, or that “we” speak Japanese. In this course, we re-examine concepts such as language, society, speech community, and code, and analyze the linguistic choices speakers make in order to express their identity in the context of society.