Language
V61.0001 Baltin, Collins, Gouskova, Szabolcsi. Offered every semester. 4 points.
Nature or nurture? Linguistics is a science that systematically addresses this puzzle, and it offers a uniquely interesting support for the answer: both. Language is a social phenomenon, but human languages share elaborate and specific structural properties. The conventions of speech communities exist, exhibit variation, and change within the strict confines of universal grammar, part of our biological endowment. Universal grammar is discovered through the careful study of the structures of individual languages, by cross-linguistic investigations, and the investigation of the brain. In this way, linguistics mediates between cognitive science and social science. This course introduces some fundamental properties of the sound system and of the structure and interpretation of words and sentences, set into this context.

Introduction to Linguistics
V61.0002 Barker, Collins, Gouskova. Offered at least every year. 4 points.
Focuses on the core areas of grammar: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Develops analytical and problem-solving skills. Examples are drawn from various European and non-European languages alongside English.

Communication: Men, Minds, and Machines
V61.0003 Dougherty. Offered every year. 4 points.
Examines signs and symbols in the communication of humans, primates, birds, computers, automata, simulata, and more, and discusses definitions of such concepts as sign, symbol, intelligence, artificial intelligence, mind, cognition, and meaning. Concerns the matter expressed by the symbol systems and the manner in which the matter is expressed: literally, abstractly, metaphorically, as a simile, by insinuation, and other methods.

Introduction to Semantics
V61.0004 Prerequisite: V61.0001, V61.0002, V61.0028, or permission of the instructor. Barker, Szabolcsi. Offered every year. 4 points.
Focuses on the compositional semantics of sentences. Introduces set theory, propositional logic, and predicate logic as tools, and goes on to investigate the empirical linguistic issues of presuppositions, quantification, scope, and polarity. Points out parallelisms between the nominal and the verbal domains.

Introduction to Psycholinguistics
V61.0005 Davidson. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
We easily recognize printed and spoken words, understand novel and complex sentences, and produce fluent speech thousands of times each day. It is also remarkable that children seem to learn the sounds and structures of their native languages with little effort. Psycholinguistics aims to understand the mental processes that underlie both the representation and acquisition of language. Topics covered in this class will include language acquisition, speech perception, lexical representation and access, sentence production, and the relationship between phonology and orthography.

Sound and Language
V61.0011 Davidson, Gafos, Gouskova, Guy. Offered at least every fall. 4 points.
Introduction to phonetic and phonological theory at an elementary level. Topics include the description and analysis of speech sounds, the anatomy and physiology of speech, speech acoustics, and phonological processes. Students develop skills to distinguish and produce sounds used in the languages of the world and to transcribe them using the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Phonological Analysis
V61.0012 Prerequisite: V61.0011 or permission of the instructor. Davidson, Gafos, Gouskova. Offered at least every spring. 4 points.
Introduction to phonology, the area of linguistics that investigates how languages organize sounds into highly constrained systems. The fundamental questions include the following: What do the sound systems of all languages have in common? How can they differ from each other? What is the nature of phonological processes, and why do they occur? Students develop analytical skills by solving phonological problems based on data from a wide variety of languages.

Grammatical Analysis
V61.0013 Prerequisite: V61.0001, V61.0002, V61.0028, or permission of the instructor. Baltin, Collins. Offered at least every fall. 4 points.
Considers the nature of grammatical rules and the relation between the grammar of a language and its acquisition by children. Also deals with the proper balance between syntax and semantics and the role of cross-linguistic considerations (comparison with other languages) in formulating the grammar of a particular language.

Language Change
V61.0014 Costello. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Introduces students to the methods of genealogical classification and subgrouping of languages. Examines patterns of replacement in phonology, morphology, and syntax. Focuses on internal and comparative phonological, morphological, and syntactic reconstruction. Considers phonological developments such as Grimm's, Grassmann's, and Verner's Laws, in detail.

Language and Society
V61.0015 Identical to V18.0701. Guy, Singler. Offered every year. 4 points.
Considers contemporary issues in the interaction of language and society, particularly work on speech variation and social structure. Focuses on ways in which social factors affect language. Topics include language as a social and political entity; regional, social, and ethnic speech varieties; bilingualism; and pidgin and creole languages.

The Indo-European Family
V61.0017 Costello. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
Presents the phonological and morphological systems of Proto-Indo-European, and considers the development thereof in the major branches of the Indo-European family of languages, in particular Indic, Hellenic, Slavic, Italic, and Germanic.

Bilingualism
V61.0018 Blake, Singler. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
Examines bilingualism and multilingualism in New York City and around the world, at the level of the individual and of society. Considers the social forces that favor or inhibit bilingualism, as well as the educational consequences of bilingual education (and of monolingual education for bilingual children). Also examines the impact of bilingualism on the languages involved. Special attention is paid to code switching, the practice of using two languages in a single speech event, with particular reference to its psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic aspects.

Structure of English Vocabulary
V61.0019 Costello. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
Deals with the origins of structures of English words. Whereas 97 percent of the vocabulary of Old English was Germanic, over 80 percent of the present-day vocabulary is borrowed. This course focuses on the portion that is borrowed from the classical languages (Latin and Greek) either directly or indirectly through French. Examines the historical and sociolinguistic circumstances of borrowing and the stem-affix structure of borrowed words, together with the regularities of their pronunciation and meaning. Relies on elementary phonology, morphology, and semantics; recommended for nonmajors.

Sex, Gender, and Language
V61.0021 Identical to V18.0712. Vasvari. Offered in the spring. 4 points.
Examines gender-based differences in language structure, including hidden sexism, semantic space, the "he/man" debate, and titles/references to the sexes.

African American English I: Language and Culture
V61.0023 Identical to V18.0799. Blake. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Introduces the language behavior of African Americans. Discusses African American Vernacular English in terms of its linguistic and cultural distinctiveness, both intrasystemically and in comparison with other dialects of American English. Relates the English vernacular spoken by African Americans in urban settings to creole languages spoken on the South Carolina Sea Islands (Gullah), in the Caribbean, and in West Africa. Also approaches the subject from the perspective of the history of the expressive uses of African American Vernacular English, and the educational, attitudinal, and social implications connected with the language.

Computational Principles of Sentence Construction
V61.0024 Prerequisite: any linguistics course. Dougherty. Offered every year. 4 points.
Introduces students to the basic computational tools available for formulating linguistic and psycholinguistic models of competence and performance. Discusses classical problems in perception and description of verb-particle constructions, questions, passives, and garden-path sentences. Considers how parsers operate in structurally different languages such as Chinese and English. Students learn sufficient computer skills (Unix, Lisp, and Prolog) to run public domain programs that model a human being's language production and perception capacities. Students have computer accounts and obtain hands-on experience with artificial intelligence and expert systems programs using symbolic logical-based computer languages. They may base their research on existing programs or write their own.

Languages in Contact
V61.0025 Prerequisite: V61.0001, V61.0002, V61.0028, or permission of the instructor. Singler. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
Language contact changes languages. This course presents a typology of contact, organized both by the nature of the contact and by its linguistic consequences. We consider the impact that contact can have on existing languages, and we pay special attention to the kind of contact that gives rise to new languages and also to the kind that kills languages. Topics include borrowing, bilingualism, language maintenance and language shift, language birth and language death, code switching, diglossia, pidginization and creolization, new Englishes, and mixed languages.

Language and Liberation: At Home in the Caribbean and Abroad
V61.0026 Identical to V18.0163. Blake. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Explores the linguistic and cultural transformations that took place in the Commonwealth Caribbean from 17th-century slavery and bond servitude to the present day. Focus is on the extent to which Caribbean people were given or demanded the freedom to create and maintain a postcolonial Caribbean identity. We first discuss the sociohistorical conditions that led to the creation of new Caribbean languages called "pidgins" and "creoles" as the English language was transplanted from Britain to the Third World. We then explore the relationship of the English-based creoles to the social, cultural, political, and literary/expressive aspects of the contexts in which they existed, and in which they continue to exist today in the Caribbean, as well as in Britain and the United States. As far as possible, parallels are drawn to French- and Spanish-influenced Caribbean communities.

Grammatical Diversity
V61.0027 Prerequisite: V61.0013 or permission of the instructor. Collins, Kayne. Offered every year. 4 points.
Introduces the syntax of languages quite different from English, from various parts of the world. Considers what they may have in common with English and with each other, and how to characterize the ways in which they differ from English and from each other.

Language and Mind
V61.0028 Identical to V89.0027. Baltin, Davidson, Gafos, Marcus, McElree, Murphy, Pylkkänen, Szabolcsi. Offered every year. 4 points.
Introduces students to the field of cognitive science through an examination of language behavior. Begins with interactive discussions of how best to characterize and study the mind. These principles are then illustrated through an examination of research and theories related to language representation and use. Draws from research in both formal linguistics and psycholinguistics.

Morphology
V61.0029 Collins. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
An introduction to the study of the internal structure of words. The two main problems in morphology are (1) how to account for the surface variability of formatives (allomorphy) and (2) how to account for their combinatorial properties (morphosyntax). Beginning from the techniques and problems of structuralist morpheme analysis, two major approaches to allomorphy are introduced: the morpheme-based model and the word-based model. In morphosyntax, we concentrate on the question of to what extent morphological combination is a matter of syntax versus the lexicon. Emphasis is on constructing morphological hypotheses and linguistic argumentation. The assignments involve in-depth analyses of data from various languages.

Language in Latin America
V61.0030 Guy. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Examines the diversity of language usage in modern Latin America and considers historical perspectives as to how the present situation came about. Considers the dialectology of Latin America: how and why American varieties of Spanish and Portuguese differ from European varieties; the distribution and nature of dialect differences in different regions of the Americas. Examines sociolinguistic issues, such as class and ethnic differences in Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas, the origin and development of standard and nonstandard varieties, and the effects of contact with Amerindian and African languages. Considers Spanish- and Portuguese-based creoles and the question of prior creolization in the popular speech of Brazil, Cuba, and other areas with a substantial population of African decent. Other topics include bilingualism, code switching, language attitudes, the impact of contact with English, and the present status of indigenous languages.

Form, Meaning, and the Mind
V61.0031 Prerequisites: V61.0004 or permission of the instructor, and V61.0013. Baltin. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Deals with the relationship between cognitive organization on the one hand and the interaction between syntax and semantics in natural language. Focuses on the debate within cognitive science as to whether or not the mind is modular (divided into distinct faculties, such as language, vision, and perhaps others). Discusses the relationship of this debate to the debate within linguistics as to whether or not syntax is an autonomous component of a grammar that feeds semantics, but does not depend on semantics itself for its functioning. Examines works in cognitive science about modularity and works in linguistics that bear on the question of the autonomy of syntax.

Writing Systems of the World
V61.0033 Costello. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
Discusses how various writing systems relate to language and questions whether writing affects language (and if so, how). The fundamental characteristics of writing are discussed: the communicative purpose of writing, the application of graphical marks on a durable surface, and the achievement of communication by virtue of the marks' conventional relation to language. The evolution of writing is traced. Students compare the writing systems that evolved in Central America, China, Sumer, and Egypt, and their descendants, with respect to their relative advantages and disadvantages, from the points of view of acquisition, the representation of language, and the effective achievement of communication.

Meaning and Time
V61.0034 Offered occasionally. 4 points.
We live embedded in the passage of time and conceive of time as the dimension of change. Our languages typically have various ways to refer to time, to distinguish between past and future, to describe sequences of events, and to set up temporal reasoning patterns. This course deals with the expression of time and tense in different languages, and the linguistic, philosophical, and psychological questions that this investigation raises. Issues include the logic of time, temporal metaphors, different kinds of situations, presentation of situations, the semantics of tense, and time, tense, and aspect in narrative discourse.

Propositional Attitudes
V61.0035 Prerequisite: V83.0085, V61.0004, or permission of the instructor. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
Advanced seminar. Investigates the nature of linguistic meaning through an examination of the semantics of sentences that report beliefs and other attitudes toward propositions, such as "Galileo believed that the earth moves." Such sentences have arguably proven problematic for all theories of meaning. We read and discuss pertinent papers by linguists and philosophers; background lectures are given on related issues, such as the semantics of proper names, pronouns, and demonstratives. Registered students are required to make two substantial class presentations and write a detailed research paper.

Indo-European Syntax
V61.0036 Costello. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
Students are introduced to the study of comparative (Proto-)Indo-European syntax. Methods of reconstructing a protosyntax are presented and compared. The course deals with recent explanations concerning the origin and development of a number of parts of speech, including adverbs and prepositions, and syntactic constructions, including absolute, relative, and periphrastic verbal constructions (for example, the passive) in Proto-Indo-European and its descendant languages. Reanalysis and grammaticalization are addressed in some detail. Questions concerning the motivation of innovations, and their implications for the overall evolution of language, are discussed.

The Syntax/Semantics Interface: Hungarian
V61.0037 Prerequisite: V61.0013 or permission of the instructor. V61.0004 is recommended but not required. Szabolcsi. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
Hungarian is known as a language that wears its semantics on its syntactic sleeve. Word order transparently identifies the topic and the focus of the sentence and disambiguates the scopes of operators such as "always," "not," and "everyone." This course studies Hungarian from the perspective of theoretical linguistics and asks what this language tells us about how the syntax/semantics interface works in universal grammar. It reviews the fundamentals of Hungarian morphology and syntax and discusses current literature. Not a language course.

Pidgin and Creole Languages
V61.0038 Prerequisite: V61.0001, V61.0002, V61.0028, or permission of the instructor. Singler. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Examines the pidginized and creolized languages of the world. Addresses three central questions: (1) how pidgins/creoles (P/Cs) come into being, (2) why P/Cs have the properties they do, and (3) why P/Cs—regardless of the circumstances of their genesis—share so many features. Examines P/Cs vis-à-vis other types of languages, considers the linguistic and social factors that contribute to the genesis of individual P/Cs, and investigates the linguistic characteristics of P/Cs. Geographic focus is on the Atlantic (creoles from the Caribbean and pidgins from West Africa), but pidgins/ creoles from the Pacific are also discussed.

Language in Use
V61.0041 Guy. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
Living languages in use by a community of speakers are diverse and dynamic. Individuals and groups of speakers differentiate and identify themselves by the way they use language; people can adapt their speech to different listeners in social settings; speakers develop their linguistic capabilities as they grow older. The language as a whole changes across time. This course examines language not from the standpoint of abstract structural description but from the perspective of how it is actively used in a speech community. We consider theoretical issues, such as how to model diversity in language use, and methodological issues, such as how to study language change while it is under way. We study appropriate quantitative methods for investigating variation across linguistic contexts, speakers, settings, and time. This course has a strong practical focus; students learn how to plan and conduct their own research on language use.

Romance Syntax
V61.0042 Prerequisite: V61.0013 or permission of the instructor. Kayne. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
Introduces the syntax of Romance languages, primarily French, Italian, and Spanish, but also various Romance dialects. Considers what they have in common with each other (and with English) and how best to characterize the ways in which they differ from each other (and from English).

Neural Bases of Language
V61.0043 Identical to V89.0300. Prerequisite: V89.0025, V89.0029, V61.0001, V61.0002, or V61.0028, or permission of the instructor. Pylkkänen. Offered every year. 4 points.
What are the brain bases of our ability to speak and understand language? Are some parts of the brain dedicated to language? What is it like to lose language? Provides a state-of-the-art survey of the cognitive neuroscience of language, a rapidly developing multidisciplinary field in the intersection of linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. Lectures cover all aspects of language processing in the healthy brain, from early sensory perception to sentence-level semantic interpretation, as well as a range of neurological and development language disorders, including aphasias, dyslexia, and genetic language impairment.

Field Methods
V61.0044 Identical to G61.0044. Prerequisite: V61.0012, V61.0013, or permission of the instructor. Collins, Gouskova. Offered every year. 4 points.
A hands-on approach to learning linguistics. Every year, a different language is chosen to investigate. Students interview a native speaker of an unfamiliar language, usually a nonlinguist, to study all aspects of the language's grammar: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics. They learn to evaluate and organize real, nonidealized linguistic data and to formulate generalizations which then serve as the basis for a research proposal. A unique opportunity to obtain a rich and complete set of data on a new topic of theoretical interest in any field of linguistics.

Evolution of Intellectual Complexity
V61.0045 Dougherty. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
How do human perception, cognition, language, and communication relate to the abilities of animals, fossil records, anthropological and archeological research, cave painting, and physiology? We broadly try to answer: What is a likely scenario for human evolution from animal origins? We argue (with Chomsky, Darwin, D'Arcy, Thompson, Turing, Lorenz, Gould) that evolution proceeds in large jumps (saltations) and that slow gradual evolution via natural selection (per Pinker, Hauser, Fitch, Lieberman) cannot account for human cognitive evolution. Readings focus on original works by Darwin, Wallace, D'Arcy, Thompson, Freud, Chomsky, Galileo, and Pinker, and includes studies by zoologists, linguists, anthropologists, archeologists, and psychologists.

African American English II
V61.0046 Identical to V18.0800. Blake. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
African American English is a distinct dialect of American English that has influenced U.S. and world cultures. Yet, from an educational perspective, its speakers have faced well-documented educational challenges. Explores contemporary, social, linguistic, and educational issues that arise for speakers of African American English in the United States. Topics covered include a history of African American language behavior, politics, and policies around the language, teacher education, language attitudes, culture and curriculum, and controversies about African American English in the schools. Also considers how educational issues surrounding African American English compare to other languages and dialects of English. Students have an opportunity to conduct original research.

The Language of America's Ethnic Minorities
V61.0047 Blake, Singler. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Examines the role of language in communities in the United States, specifically within African American, Asian American, Latino, and Native American populations. Explores the relationship of language to culture, race, and ethnicity. In particular, it looks for similarities and differences across these communities and considers the role that language experiences play in current models of race and ethnicity.

Linguistics as Cognitive Science
V61.0048 Identical to G61.0048. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor. Marantz. Offered every year. 4 points.
Examines the place of linguistics within cognitive science from multiple perspectives. Foundational questions for a science of linguistics will be addressed both from within linguistics and from philosophy and psychology. Issues include the nature of the evidence for constructing grammars, the interpretation of grammatical rules as cognitive or neural operations, the significance of neo-behaviorist approaches to language and computational modeling for a cognitive theory of language, the connection between linguistics theory and genetics, and the importance of sociocultural and historical variation for understanding the nature of language. Students will be expected to engage in debate over these issues, bringing to the table their own backgrounds in one of the relevant disciplines, as well as what they learn from the assigned readings. The primary instructor will be joined for several of the lectures by guest speakers with complementary expertise.

Endangered Languages
V61.0050 Collins. Offered every other year. 4 points.
The languages of the world are dying off at an alarming rate. We will attempt to answer the following questions during the semester: Why do languages die off? If a language dies, does a culture die with it? How is the structure of a language (phonology, morphology, syntax) affected by language death? Why should we care about language endangerment, and is there anything we can do about it? Each student will "adopt" an endangered language and look into it extensively during the course of the semester.

Attempts to Model Mind and Brain Using Computers
V61.0053 Prerequisite: V61.0001, V61.0002, V61.0028, or permission of the instructor. Dougherty. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
We examine the possibility that in the evolution of human and animal brains, no selectional pressure existed for any brain to evolve to understand its own principles of operation. Brain tissues, and the functional capacities correlated with them, evolved to increase perceptual, cognitive, and language capacities to aid in eluding predators, capturing prey, mate selection, nest building, infant rearing—all novel evolved complexity-yielding survival advantages. We argue no survival advantage correlates with the brain's ability to introspect and understand its own operation. We examine novel "graphically orientated" computer models of self-replicating machines, called cellular automata by Wolfram (A New Kind of Science) and by Kurzweil, that define "complexity" that correlates with languages, cognition, and perception. We study Darwin's idea of "monstrosities" in relation to human evolution from earlier primates. No hard math required. Lectures use computer-generated graphics, sound, and animation.

Learning to Speak: The First and Second Language Acquisition of Sound
V61.0054 Prerequisite: V61.0011 or V61.0012. Davidson. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
Focuses on the acquisition of sound systems by first and second language learners. In some ways, these tasks are very similar, but they differ in other crucial aspects. We discuss scientific data from both first and second language acquisition of sound systems to understand how humans learn language both in infancy and adulthood. Presup-poses an introduction to phonetics, phonology, and/or psycholinguistics.

Introduction to Morphology at an Advanced Level
V61.0055 Identical to G61.1029. Prerequisites: V61.0011 and V61.0012. Marantz. Offered every year. 4 points.
Examines the building blocks of words and sentences: the atomic units of word structure, their hierarchical and linear arrangement, and their phonological realiza-tion(s). Provides an introduction to fundamental issues in morphology, including allomorphy, morpheme order, paradigm structure, blocking, and cyclicity. The field of morphology currently embraces much of what goes on in linguistics as a whole; syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, and variation all play an essential role, and their interactions are highlighted here.

Introduction to English Grammar
V61.0056 Collins. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
An introductory overview of the grammar of English. No prior knowledge of linguistics is assumed. We survey the major areas of English grammar, including the following: parts of speech (verb, noun, adjective, preposition, adverb), participles, auxiliary verbs, count and noncount nouns, definite and indefinite articles, subjects, objects, predicates, types of clauses (declarative, interrogative, exclamative, imperative), passive versus active verbs, negation, and relative clauses. Will be of interest to students of English literature, English grammar, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, and psychology. Also useful to people thinking of going into language teaching, and those interested in improving their writing through greater attention to English grammar. Note: This is not an English as a Second Language (ESL) course. Students are expected to be native speakers of English or to have a very high level of proficiency in English.

A Cultural History of Computers, Robots, and Artificial Intelligence
V61.0051 Dougherty. Offered every year. 4 points.
Considers primary source material on the mind-body problem and on linguistic criteria for intelligence, starting with Galileo and Descartes, and continuing up to the present day. Examines mechanical analogies of mind developed since 1500. Readings from Galileo, Descartes, Voltaire, Huxley, Darwin, Arnauld, Turing, Kuhn, and Penfield. Focuses on Chomsky's Cartesian linguistics and the claim that current ideas concerning mind, language, and intelligence parallel closely those of the Cartesians of the 17th century.

Etymology
V61.0076 Identical to V27.0023 and V65.0076. Costello. Offered every other year. 4 points.
Traces the origin and development of English words. Discusses ways in which new words are created. Introduces concepts of phonological and semantic change, which students apply in identifying cognates linking English with other languages, in particular, but not limited to, Latin and Greek.

Seminar: Research on Current Problems in Linguistics
V61.0102 Prerequisite: permission of the instructor. Offered occasionally. 4 points.
Course content varies; see the description of each offering at the department's home page.

Internship
V61.0980,0981 Prerequisite: permission of director of undergraduate studies. In the term prior to the internship, the student must present a written description of the proposed internship that clearly indicates the linguistic content of the project. 1 to 4 points.

Independent Study
V61.0997,0998 Prerequisite: permission of director of undergraduate studies. 1 to 4 points each term.