Linguistics 001 Schedule of lectures and readings

(Fall 2009)

Follow the links in the middle column for lecture notes. In this course, these are notes for the lecture, rather than notes on the lecture, so that they serve as an on-line textbook. As such, they generally provide a larger volume of material than is presented in the lectures. In class, I'll give an overview of the day's topic, and work through examples and sample problems in detail, typically in ways that are not entirely covered in the lecture notes.

The right-hand column provides links to additional course readings. These are articles or book chapters that provide useful background. In many cases, additional links will be provided within the main page of lecture notes.

[NOTE: lecture notes and additional readings for 2009 are under revision, and will appear here by the time the relevant section of the course begins. For a sense of what they will be like see the schedule for an earlier edition of the course.]

1. We 09/09	Introduction to the course	[introductory video]
2. Mo 09/14	Perspectives and approaches	Miller, George A. "The Scientific Study of Language." Ch. 1 of The Science of Words. (1991).
3. We 09/16	Prescriptive and descriptive linguistics	Nunberg G. "The Decline of Grammar". The Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1983., Halpern, M. "A War that Never Ends". The Atlantic Monthly, March 1997. (Just for fun: "Some kind of grammar, um, strict police"; "Hot Dryden-on-Jonson action"; "Teaching zombie rules"; "Angry linguistic mobs with torches".)
4. Mo 09/21	Communication: a biological perspective [slides from lecture]	Pinker, S. "An instinct to acquire an art". Ch. 1 in The Language Instinct (1994). Smith. and Szathmary, The Origins of Life. (1999): Ch. 2 "The Major Transitions" Ch 12 "From Animal Societies to Human Societies" Ch. 13 "The Origin of Language" (Just for fun: "Can a dog learn a word?"; "The strange, new sight"; "Signs and symbols; words and tools")
5. We 09/23	Communication: philosophical perspectives	[see links in lecture notes]
6. Mo 09/28	The pronunciation of English
7. We 09/30	Basic elements of linguistic form: morphology	(Just for fun: "Psycholinguistics in the logging industry" "All your base are belong to which lexical category?" "Linguists boycott Intelligent Design hearings" "Fearful (also nauseous, addictive, dubious, suspicious...) symmetry" "Not a brillantological invention" "W's conundrum" "Euphony and usefulness" "Cracking down on the Hezbollians" "Playing with your morphology" "Bogosity")
8. Mo 10/05	The sound of linguistic structure: phonetics	(Just for fun: "Nationality, gender and pitch" "Regional speech rates" "One 75-millisecond step before a 'man'" "The rhetoric of silence" "The phonetics of uptalk" "Another slice of prosodic sausage" "Phonetic gaydar" "Poem in the key of what" "Puzzle of the day: The constitution in B flat?" "The phonetic poetics of 'a'" )
9. We 10/07	The structure of linguistic sound: phonology
10. Mo 10/12	Syntax I (lecture slides)	Read & study HW6 (and answers) from 2005 (note that you aren't required to turn this in.) (just for fun: "Crash blossoms" "Compared" "Fucking shut the fuck up" "Not propping open the door" "Insufficient agency" "He must can parse" "Adverbial modification at the Supreme Court today" "Elliptical sin" "'Passive Voice' -- 1397-2009 -- R.I.P." "Hot Dryden-on-Jonson action" "Those who are not authorized are not authorized" )
11. We 10/14	Syntax II	Beatrice Santorini's Syntax Text , Chap. 2: "Constituent structure".
Mo 10/19	FALL BREAK
12. We 10/21	Meaning I: semantics	(Just for fun: "The reality could not be further from the truth" "Cannot underestimate" = "must not underestimate?" "Why are negations so easy to fail to miss?")
13. Mo 10/26	Meaning II: pragmatics	(Just for fun: "Is irony universal?" "Locating the sarcasm bump" "Duding out" "Improve your love life through the power of pragmatics")
14. We 10/28	Language in society: sociolinguistics	Labov, W. "Driving Forces in Linguistic Change." International Conference on Korean Linguistics, August 2, 2002. Seoul National University (Just for fun: "Palin's tactical g-lessness" "Joe Wilson's problem with progessives" "The sociolinguistics of English middle names" "Real BeijingeRs" "Our Z remains Z from Sindh to Punjab" "Prescriptivism in Europe" "Slurry" "Doomed to mediocrity by accent" "'Be done' again" "Status and fluency" )
15. Mo 11/02	Language and gender	(Just for fun: "Cute" "The new fashion for biological determinism" "Sax Q & A" "Misleading pseudo-scientific argument of the week" "CNN hits the trifecta" "High crockalorum" "David Brooks, cognitive neuroscientist" "Are men emotional children?" "David Brooks, neuroendocrinologist")
We 11/04	Midterm	(Study guide, 2007 Midterm, answers)
16. Mo 11/09	Linguistic form in art, ritual and play
17. We 11/11	Patterns and performances in speech and music	[Slides in .ppt form; zip archive including audio files] (archive is about 27 MB) (Just for fun: "ma ko MA ko SA" … "ma MA ku SA" "Arom on polyrhythms" "Rock syncopation: stress shifts or polyrhythms?" "Bembé, Attis, Orpheus")
18. Mo 11/16	Language production and perception	(Just for fun: "Reverse English" "Phonetics quiz" "Notes from the ESL trauma unit" "Noi lai and contrepets" "Get your boyfriend to move it: a speech perception story" "The doors of infant perception" "Escher sentences" )
19. We 11/18	Brain and language	(Just for fun: "Blinded by neuroscience" "Distracted by the brain" "David Brooks, Cognitive Neuroscientist" "Localization of emotion perception in the brain of fish" "Flacks and hacks and brainscans" "Color vocabulary and pre-attentive color perception" "The inner fish speaks" "Debasing the coinage of rational inquiry: a case study" "Locating the sarcasm bump")
20. Mo 11/23	Reading and writing	"The globalization of educational fads and fallacies" "Reading corruption" "Mark Seidenberg on the Reading First controversy"
We 11/25	[Thanksgiving: No lecture]
21. Mo 11/30	Child language acquisition
22. We 12/02	Languages of the World	Gibbs, W. W. "Saving Dying Languages". Scientific American, August 2002.
23. Mo 12/07	Language Change
24. We 12/09	The Language of Law	Justice Antonin Scalia, "Law and Language: Review of 'Law's Quandary'", First Things, Nov. 2005. Lawrence Solan, "Private Language, Public Laws: The Central Role of Legislative Intent in Statutory Interpretation", Georgetown Law Journal, 93(2), Jan. 2005 Geoffrey Nunberg, "The Book of Samuels", Fresh Air commentary.
Th 12/17	Final Exam	12:00-2:00

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