Increased communication skill in American Sign Language (ASL). Expressive and receptive abilities are expanded upon via a contextualized and conversational manner Important topics to Deaf communities and Deaf culture are continued within online and in-class discussion.

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.

Readings in the cultural evolution of language. This encompasses research on the contribution of processes of cultural change to the emergence of language in the human species, the emergence of new languages, and language change viewed as a cultural-evolutionary process. There will be an emphasis on research employing empirical methods, particularly experimentation. Otherwise focus varies from term to term.

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

Topics in Semantics & Pragmatics

A general introduction at the graduate level to the analysis of sentence structure. The approach taken is that of contemporary generative-transformational grammar.

This course investigates how quantitative methods can be combined with linguistic analysis to improve our understanding of phonetic and phonological phenomena, including variation. Students learn to carry out original research on data from time-aligned speech corpora of English varieties.

First half of a year-long introduction to the formal study of phonology. Basic concepts in articulatory phonetics; the distribution of sounds (phonemes and allophones); underlying and surface forms, and how to relate them using both ordered-rule and surface-constraint approaches. The survey of theoretical topics in this term includes distinctive features (context, organization, underspecification); the autosegmental representation of tone; and the theory of phonological domains and their interaction with morphological and syntactic constituency. Emphasizes hands-on analysis of a wide range of data.

Speech: its linguistic transcription, its quantitative physical description, and its relationship to the categories and dimensions of language structure and use. The physical basis of speech: acoustics, vocal tract anatomy and physiology, hearing and speech perception, articulation and motor control. Phonetic variation and change. Prosody: stress, intonation, phrasing speech rate. Phonetic instrumentation, the design and interpretation of phonetic experiments, and the use of phonetic evidence in linguistic research, with emphasis on computer techniques. Introduction to speech signal processing. Speech technology: introduction to speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speech coding. This course will emphasize the phonetics of natural speech, and its connections to issues in other areas of linguistics and cognitive science.