(Fall 2023)
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.
This fall's edition of ling001, as far as we know now, will be
entirely in person. In case of changes in the pandemic situation, we may switch to a hybrid mode, with lectures and sections available both in person and on Zoom.
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 08/30
|
Introduction to the
course |
|
2. W 09/06
|
Perspectives and
approaches |
|
3. M 09/11 |
Prescriptive
and descriptive linguistics |
Fadiman, A. "All
my pronouns, 2020.
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 09/13 |
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"
"Musical protolanguage: Darwin's theory of language evolution revisited" |
5. M 09/18
|
Communication:
philosophical perspectives |
"What did
Justice Scalia mean?";
"Grice
in the Ladies' Room";
"The
implications of excessive praise";
Dan Zettwoch, "Deadlock"
"The strange, new sight"
|
6. W 09/20 |
Basic elements of
linguistic form: morphology
|
"Who
let the 'n' in?"
"The
curious case of quasiregularity"
"Sasha
Aikhenvald on Inuit snow words"
"The evolutionary psychology of irregular morphology"
"Obamorphology"
"Linguistician?"
|
7. M 09/25
|
The structure of
linguistic sound: phonology
|
"The Invisible Academy"
"Phonology in the comics"
"Wanna, gotta"
"Pronunciation evolution"
"Ecology and phonology"
|
8. W 09/27
|
The sound of linguistic structure:
phonetics
|
"Syllables"
"On beyond the (International Phonetic) Alphabet"
"Birdsong Leaning and Culture: Analogies with Human Spoken Language"
|
9. M 10/02 |
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.
|
10. W 10/04
|
Syntax
I
|
"Parsers that count"
"Inaugural embedding"
"Parataxis in Pirahã"
"More Flesch-Kincaid grade-level nonsense"
"Homo
hemingwayensis"
"Articles
currently living in the Hamilton area"
"Call me
Ishmael"
"Writing
style and dementia"
"Nun study
update"
|
11. M 10/09
|
Syntax II
Guide to some confusable
terminology
Language and the Law
Legal Syntax
|
Santorini & Kroch's Syntax
Text , Chap. 2:
"Constituent structure".
"Fear and
Loathing of the English Passive"
"Confusion
over avoiding the passive"
"When
men were men, and verbs were passive"
"Dependency Grammar v. Constituency Grammar
|
12. W 10/11
|
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 10/16
|
Meaning II: pragmatics
|
|
14. W 10/18 |
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. M 10/23 |
Language and gender |
|
W 10/25
|
MIDTERM 1 (topics 1-13) |
Sample Questions and Answers |
16. M 10/30 |
Brain and
language
Lecture Slides |
"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"
"Automated Analysis of Natural Speech in
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Spectrum Disorders" |
17. W 11/01 |
Linguistic form in art,
ritual and play |
|
18. M 11/06
|
Patterns and performances in speech and music |
|
19. W 11/08
|
Language production and
perception
|
"Finger spoonerisms
and conservation of caps"
"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 11/13 |
Computational Linguistics
Lecture
Slides
(See also "The Future of Computational Linguistics")
|
"Human
Language Technology"
"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 11/15 |
NO CLASS! |
|
22. M 11/20 |
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?"
"Lost in Translation? Challenges in Connecting
Reading Science and Educational Practice" |
W 11/22 | THANKSGIVING! |
23. M 11/27
|
Child language
acquisition |
|
24. W 11/29 |
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"
Alexandre François, "Trees,
Waves and Linkages: Models of Language
Diversification". |
25. M 12/04
|
Languages of the
World
|
Gibbs, W. W. "Saving Dying
Languages" Scientific American, August
2002.
"Experiencing
language death"
World Atlas of Language
Structures
Ethnologue (and its
list of
language families)
(Note that you may need to connect via
Penn's VPN to get Ethnologue access) |
26. W
12/06 |
American Sign Language
|
(lecture
slides)
Beatrice Santorini, "Notes
on iconicity and arbitrariness" |
M 12/11 |
MIDTERM 2 |
|
|
home
homework
|