Linguistics

This course focuses on some central topics and arguments in the philosophy of mind and language in the tradition of analytic philosophy. The main aim is to engage in detail with arguments and texts that have played a central role in contemporary discussions. Topics include: the nature of linguistic and mental content; the nature of thought and its relation to linguistic understanding; what is reference and meaning and what are their relations to intentionality and concepts; the relation between our inferential and representational abilities and the nature of our rationality; the nature and our knowledge of our mental states; the relation between the physical and the mental domains. Students acquire an understanding of central topics in the philosophy of mind and language and they will be in a position to explain and to engage competently orally and in writing with these problems. More specifically they will be in a position to: master the central concepts in the theory of language and mind; understand the philosophical positions involved on the debates; understand the arguments in favor or against the relevant philosophical theses; have some appreciation of the significance of these issues for other areas of philosophy.

This course examines some central topics in the philosophies of language. We discuss core concepts such as that of truth, meaning, validity, inference. We then focus on the normative role of truth and validity in relation to reasoning. Although this course does not presuppose any specific competence in formal logic, some basic acquaintance in elementary formal logic may help.

This is a course about early language acquisition. Students learn to describe pre-linguistic and early linguistic development in children; outline the stages of phonetic and phonological development in typically-developing children; analyze the salient phonetic and phonological characteristics of speech samples from children typically developing speech; explain how children's vocabulary develops in the pre-school years; outline the course of early grammatical development in children; describe the processes involved in early simultaneous and sequential bilingualism; and appreciate the effects of early language delay and disorder on the acquisition of speech, language and communication.

This course is an introductory survey of linguistics, focusing on natural language phenomena, and the methods and findings of linguists seeking to understand them. Students address the following subdomains of linguistics during the course: phonetics (physical properties of language forms, e.g. sounds), phonology (the psychological representation of language forms), morphology (how language forms combine to form words), syntax (how words combine to form phrases and sentences), semantics (the meanings of words, phrases, and sentences), pragmatics (how sentences are used in context), language acquisition (how languages are learned by children and adults), sociolinguistics (how language is affected by social context), and language and the brain (how language is processed in the brain and language disorders).

This course requires international students to facilitate ten conversation sessions in their maternal language (English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.) to French-speaking students. The conversation groups have a maximum of seven students. At the end of the semester, conversation workshop teachers are graded based on evaluations by the French students and a reflective report assignment.

This course discusses the main applications of linguistics in the analysis of the language in legal documents, language used in legal contexts, and language produced by those familiar with the field in the forensic institutional context. It explores the theoretical-methodological problems in the linguistic analysis of forensic text as well as the unequal distribution of power in the forensic institutional context.

This course provides a detailed account of dialects of English in Britain and Ireland. It examines how these varieties differ in terms of their phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexis. Students look in detail at specific dialects, specifically at their linguistic features, historical origins, relations to other dialects, and the current forces which are shaping their development, from dialectological, sociolinguistic, perceptual, and theoretical linguistic perspectives. Dialect and language contact, dialect levelling, and new dialect formation are also explored.

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.