Anthony Kroch
614 Williams Hall
898-3212
kroch@change.ling.upenn.edu
Read the Linguistics 101 news group for announcements and post to it with questions and discussion.
Linguistics 101 is an introduction to linguistics from the point of view of its logical and mathematical foundations. Its goal is to teach the basic structural properties of natural language sentences in their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects, as well as the elements of automata theory and logic needed to describe natural language precisely. The course begins with a discussion of the philosophical and psychological foundations of modern linguistics and moves from there to more technical matters.
Linguistics 101 has no prerequisites and fulfills the formal reasoning requirement in SAS. It is also a basic part of the Linguistics major and of the interdisciplinary Cognitive Science minor. Related courses are Linguistics 150: Introduction to Syntax and Linguistics 105: Introduction to Cognitive Science. Students interested in the Linguistics major and/or the Cognitive Science minor should contact the Undergraduate Chair in Linguistics.
There are weekly assignments for the course, which are posted to this page. Some of them make use of a Macintosh program, "Trees," which was developed specially for this course and which can be downloaded from the web. The course also has one mid-term exam and a final exam.