This course is a graduate seminar in neurolinguistics. We will explore language in the brain through readings and discussion.

Game Theory has provided a new way of looking at linguistic meaning, particularly pragmatics (the use of language). This course will survey the use of Game Theory in linguistics as well as develop the techniques for studying signaling behavior. We will look at the formal foundations of signaling with particular attention paid to games of incomplete information (games where even which game is being played is uncertain). This will allow us to extend pragmatics beyond Gricean conversational maxims to areas like deception and polite signaling.

This course provides an introduction to formal semantics for natural language. The main aim is to develop a semantic system that provides a compositional interpretation of natural language sentences. We discuss various of the aspects central to meaning composition, including function application, modification, quantification, and binding, as well as issues in the syntax-semantics interface. The basic formal tools relevant for semantic analysis, including set theory, propositional logic, and predicate logic are also introduced.

This course traces the linguistic history of English from its earliest reconstructable ancestor, Proto-Indo-European, to the present. We focus especially on significant large-scale changes, such as the restructuring of the verb system in Proto-Germanic, the intricate interaction of sound changes in the immediate prehistory of Old English, syntactic change in Middle English, and the diversification of English dialects since 1750.

This course is an upper level undergraduate/graduate seminar in neurolinguistics. We will explore language in the brain through readings and discussions.

This tutorial allows students to deal in a concentrated manner with selected major topics in linguistics by means of extensive readings and research. Two topics are studied during the semester, exposing students to a range of sophisticated linguistic questions. Senior status or permission of the instructor to enroll. Majors only.

When a flu pandemic strikes, who should get vaccinated first? What's our best strategy for minimizing the damage of global climate change? Why is Philadelphia racially segregated? Why do most sexually reproducing species have two sexes, in roughly even proportions? These and many other scientific and practical problems require us to get a handle on complex systems. And an important part of deepening our understanding and sharpening our intuitions requires us to think with models, that is, to use models in our deliberations about what to believe and what to do.Modeling is the construction and analysis of idealized representations of real-world phenomena. This practice is ubiquitous across the sciences, and enters into many practical decisions from setting international policy to making everyday business decisions. The principal aim of this course is to acquaint students with the modeling process and, especially, to help students learn how to think critically about modeling results, as well as how to construct, analyze, and verify such models. Students who take this course will learn about the varied practices of modeling, and will learn how to construct, analyze, and validate models. Most importantly, students who take this course will learn how to critically evaluate the predictions and explanations generated by models, whatever the source of these results. While we will familiarize students with a variety of types of models, our primary focus will be on computer simulations, as they are increasingly relied upon for scientific research and practical deliberation. In addition to studying general methodological discussions about modeling, this will be a "hands on," laboratory-based course. Students will practice manipulating, modifying, and analyzing models, as well as constructing models from scratch. The conduct of the course will be heavily influenced by SAIL (structured active in-class learning) ideas. As such, in most class meetings there will be a short lecture and Q&A session, followed by individual and group exercises, which will be discussed later in the class. As an essential feature of learning about modeling we will actually design and build (program) models, which we then study. NetLogo will be the main programming environment. Students will learn to program in it and build agent-based models. NetLogo was designed to be easy to learn and we assume no prior programming experience. For approximately the first 2/3 of the course we will focus on learning NetLogo and building and analyzing models in it. During approximately the last 1/3 of the semester, students will work on their term projects and the course presentations will focus on modeling

An introduction to language acquisition in children and the development of related cognitive and perceptual systems. Topics include the nature of speech perception and the specialization to the native language; the structure and acquisition of words; children's phonology; the development of grammar; bilingualism and second language acquisition; language learning impairments; the biological basis of language acquisition; the role in language learning in language change. Intended for any undergraduate interested in the psychology and development of language.

This course is an introduction to current syntactic theory, covering the principles that govern phrase structure (the composition of phrases and sentences), movement (dependencies between syntactic constituents), and binding (the interpretation of different types of noun phrases). Although much of the evidence discussed in the class will come from English, evidence from other languages will also play an important role, in keeping with the comparative and universalist perspective of modern syntactic theory.

This course focuses on experimental investigations of speech sounds. General contents include: the fundamentals of speech production and perception; speech analysis tools and techniques; and topics in phonetic studies. The course consists of integrated lectures and laboratory sessions in which students learn computer techniques for analyzing digital recordings.