(Fall 2019)
There is no textbook for this course -- all
required readings will be linked in this schedule, or in the
lecture notes. The links (and the lecture notes) should
appear in their final form roughly a week ahead of the
corresponding lecture dates. It's also possible that the order of lectures will
be changed over the course of the semester -- any such changes
will be reflected on this page.
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.
|
1. W 08/28
|
Introduction to
the course |
|
| M 09/02 |
Labor Day |
|
|
2. W 09/04
|
Perspectives and
approaches |
|
| 3. M 09/09 |
Prescriptive
and descriptive linguistics |
Nunberg G. "The
Decline of Grammar". The Atlantic, 1983.
Halpern, M. "A War that Never
Ends". The Atlantic, 1997.
"James
Kilpatrick, Linguistic socialist"
"25
Questions for Teaching with 'Word Crimes'"
"If
it was good enough for King Alfred the Great";
"Hot
Dryden-on-Jonson action";
"Some
kind of grammar, um, strict police";
"Teaching
zombie rules";
"The
social psychology of linguistic naming and shaming";
"Angry
linguistic mobs with torches";
"Uptalk
anxiety";
"English
grammar: not for debate";
"The
future and the past";
"Logical
prescriptivism"'
"The
theology of phonology" |
| 4. W 09/11 |
Communication:
a biological perspective
[slides]
|
Robert Seyfarth & Dorothy
Cheney, "The
Evolution of Language from Social Cognition"
"The
science and theology of global language change";
"The
Wrathful Dispersion Controversy";
"JP
versus FHC+CHF versus PJ versus HCF";
"Chomksy
testifies in Kansas";
"A
new idea about the evolution of language" |
|
5. M 09/16
|
Communication:
philosophical perspectives
(Lecture slides) |
"What
did Justice Scalia mean?";
"Grice
in the Ladies' Room";
"The
implications of excessive praise";
Dan Zettwoch, "Deadlock"
"The
strange, new sight"
|
| 6. M 09/18 |
Basic elements
of linguistic form: morphology
(Lecture slides)
|
"Who
let the 'n' in?"
"The
curious case of quasiregularity"
"Sasha
Aikhenvald on Inuit snow words" |
|
7. W 09/23
|
The sound of linguistic
structure: phonetics
|
For examples of how the IPA can be used to
transcribe various geographically and socially diverse
varieties of English, see the
speech accent archive at GMU. |
|
8. M 09/25
|
The structure
of linguistic sound: phonology
|
Mawukakan
Tone
|
| 9. W 09/30 |
The pronunciation of English
|
For examples of how the IPA can
be used to transcribe various geographically and socially
diverse varieties of English, see the
speech accent archive at GMU.
See also "On beyond the (International Phonetic) Alphabet". |
|
10. W 10/02
|
Syntax I
|
"Inaugural
embedding"
"Parataxis
in Pirahã"
"Homo
hemingwayensis"
"Articles
currently living in the Hamilton area"
"Call
me Ishmael"
"Writing
style and dementia"
"Nun
study update"
|
|
11. M 10/07
|
Syntax II
Guide to some confusable terminology
|
Santorini & Kroch's Syntax
Text , Chap. 2:
"Constituent
structure".
Geoffrey Pullum, "Fear
and Loathing of the English Passive", Language and
Communication 2014.
"Confusion
over avoiding the passive"
"When men were men, and verbs were passive"
|
|
12. W 10/09
|
Meaning I: semantics
|
"No
wug is too dax to be zonged"
"The
Wason selection test"
"'Cannot
underestimate' = 'must not underestimate'?"
"Donkeys
in Cyberspace!"
|
|
13. M 10/14
|
Meaning II: pragmatics
|
|
| We 10/16 |
MIDTERM 1 |
Sample questions and answers
|
| 14. M 10/21 |
Language in society: sociolinguistics |
Labov, W. "Driving
Forces in Linguistic Change." International
Conference on Korean Linguistics, August 2, 2002. Seoul
National University
"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. W 10/23
|
Language and gender
|
|
| 16. M 10/28 |
Brain and language
|
"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" |
| 17. W 10/30 |
Linguistic form in
art, ritual and play |
|
|
18. M 11/04
|
Patterns and performances in speech and
music |
|
|
19. W 11/06
|
Language
production and perception
|
"Finger
spoonerisms and conservation of caps"
"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"
"The
Wason Selection Test"
"Halfalogues
onward"
"This
delayed and dominating echo"
The
Eggcorn Database
|
| 20. M 11/11 |
Computational Linguistics
Lecture Slides
|
"Data-Driven
Content Analysis of Social Media: A Systematic Overview
of Automated Methods"
"Personality,
Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The
Open-Vocabulary Approach"
"Sex,
age, and pronouns on Facebook"
"More
fun with Facebook pronouns"
"More
fun with Facebook: THE"
Cournot 2015
PREM 2019
NLPCC 2019
|
| 21. W 11/13 |
Languages of
the World
|
Gibbs, W. W. "Saving
Dying Languages". Scientific American,
August 2002.
"Experiencing
language death" |
| 22. M 11/18
|
Reading
and writing |
"The
globalization of educational fads and fallacies"
"Reading
corruption"
"Mark
Seidenberg on the Reading First controversy"
"Ghoti
and choughs again"
"Conditional
entropy and the Indus Script"
"The
Gladwell pivot"
"Why are we still teaching reading the wrong way?"
"Hard Words: Why aren't kids being taught to read?"
|
|
23. W 11/20
|
Child language
acquisition |
|
|
24. M 11/25
|
The
Language of Law |
Antonin Scalia, "Law
and Language: Review of 'Law's Quandary'"
Lawrence Solan, "Private
Language, Public Laws: The Central Role of Legislative
Intent in Statutory Interpretation"
Geoffrey Nunberg, "The
Book of Samuels"
"Is
marriage identical or similar to itself?"
"100% grated parmesan cheese" doesn't have to be all cheese, court rules
"SCOTUS: A fish is not a 'tangible object'"
"Adverbial modification at the Supreme Court"
"The billion-dollar conjunction"
"Just Semantics: The Lost Readings of the Americans with Disabilities Act"
"Corpora and the Second Amendment" |
| W
11/27 |
Thur-Fri classes
on Tue-Wed |
|
| 25. M 12/02 |
Language
Change |
"Ticks
and tocks of glottoclocks"
"Good
glottochronology"
"1421"
"More
on Harper"
"New
results on Austronesian linguistic phylogeny"
"The
linguistic diversity of aboriginal Europe"
"Horse
and wheel in the early history of Indo-European"
"The
linguistic history of horses, gods and wheeled
vehicles"
David Anthony and Don Ringe, "The
Indo-European Homeland from Linguistic and
Archaeological Perspectives" |
| 26.
W 12/04 |
American Sign Language
(Guest lecture by Beatrice
Santorini
and Jami
Fisher) |
(lecture
slides) |
| Mo 12/09 |
MIDTERM 2
|
Sample
exam (from 2015) |
|
home
homework
|