Introduction to American Sign Language ( ASL ). Introduces ASL in a contextualized and conversational manner. Course includes receptive and expressive readiness activities, sign vocabulary and grammar, and an introduction to important topics and people within Deaf communities and Deaf culture.

A general introduction to the nature, history and use of human language, speech and writing. Topics include the biological basis of human language, and analogous systems in other creatures; relations to cognition, communication, and social organization; sounds, forms and meanings in the world's languages; the reconstruction of linguistic history and the family tree of languages; dialect variation and language standardization; language and gender; language learning by children and adults; the neurology of language and language disorders; the nature and history of writing systems. Intended for any undergraduate interested in language or its use, this course is also recommended as an introduction for students who plan to major in linguistics.

This is a seminar on how language relates to perception and cognition. The seminar pays particular attention to the question of whether and how language might affect (and be affected by) other mental processes, how different languages represent the mental and physical world, and how children acquire language-general and language-specific ways of encoding human experience. The course incorporates cross-linguistic, cognitive and developmental perspectives on a new and rapidly changing research area.

Detailed study of topics in syntax and semantics, e.g., pronominalization, negation, complementation. Topics vary from term to term.

Topics in Phonetics

Selected topics either in Indo-European comparative linguistics or in historical and comparative method.

An investigation of the psychological representations and processing of words. Topics include: the extraction of words from speech; lexical access and production; the induction of morphological and phonological regularities in word learning; decomposition of morphologically complex words; frequency effects in morphological processing; storage vs. computation in the lexicon; the past tense debate; morphological change. This course makes extensive use of linguistic corpora. Students will also be familiarized with experimental design issues in the psycholinguistic study of the lexicon.

Introduction to the study of the syntax of languages attested only in historical corpora. The course will cover methods and results in the grammatical description of such languages and in the diachronic study of syntactic change.

The second half of a year-long introduction to the formal study of natural language syntax. Topics to be covered include grammatical architecture; derivational versus representational statement of syntactic principles; movement and locality; the interface of syntax and semantics; argument structure; and other topics. The emphasis is on reading primary literature and discussing theoretical approaches, along with detailed case-studies of specific syntactic phenomena in different languages.