academics

Fall 2007 schedule

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70100 Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics
Wednesday 6:30 - 8:30pm, 3 credits, Marcel den Dikken/ Ricardo Otherguy

This course traces the main concepts and problems of modern theoretical linguistics to its historical ancestors, sketching the development of linguistics through the centuries. It pauses at episodes which have proved particularly significant, looking at case studies that characterise these developmental stages (in the domains of phonology, morphology and syntax), presented in the class in the form of problem sets. Attention will be paid to the development of the generative approach to linguistic theory, as well as to functionalist approaches and sociolinguistics. In a series of guest lectures by CUNY faculty at the end of the semester, the course will also address four applied fields of linguistic research prominently featured in the Program: first language acquisition, second language acquisition, computational linguistics, and sentence processing.

70500 Second Language Acquisition
Wednesday 2:00 - 4:00 pm, 3 credits, Elain Klein

In this course, we will examine two of the characteristics that make second language or non-native language acquisition (NNLA) unique and distinct from native (or first) language acquisition: The first is the type of evidence needed for the attainment of NNLA, focusing on the study of negative evidence (aka corrective feedback) and its controversial role in NNLA. The second area of concentration is the impact of prior linguistic experience on NNLA, including the native language as well as other non-native languages acquired previously. The course is open to students new to second language acquisition, along with those who are more advanced. For the former group, there will be opportunities to collect data and formulate a research proposal on the basis on literature in one of the two areas of concentration. More advanced students can carry out a research project of their choosing; such students are requested to consult with the instructor prior to registration for the course.

70600 Introduction to Psycholinguistics
Tuesday 2:00 - 4:00 pm, 3 credits, Dianne Bradley

This course is designed for students in linguistics with no necessary background in experimental psychology. It is intended to acquaint them with the questions that psycholinguists ask about language phenomena, and the research techniques through which answers to those questions are pursued. It surveys current research and theory in human language processing, construed broadly.

The core concerns of psycholinguistics lie in the mechanisms by which speaker-hearers deploy their abstract knowledge of a language's grammar to produce the remarkably fluent performance that characterizes everyday language use. And, since our uses of language routinely invoke our construal of an external world, we concern ourselves also with how the language faculty interfaces with other cognitive domains. We focus primarily on the variety of mental structures and processes supporting the adult monolingual speaker's primary language behaviors - comprehension and production - and on the coordination of these processes in real time. This provides the basis for considering illustrative examples of performance in, e.g., bilingual speakers.

Every class emphasizes the issues of experimental design and method that are standard in research gathering evidence about language behaviors. The aim is to equip students for careful and considered reading of current research reports in the field, and to build towards the skills set required for conducting research projects of one's own.

71100 Introduction to Linguistic Phonetics
Thursday 2:00 - 4:00 pm, 3 credits, Dianne Bradley
Course website

Phoneticians study the properties of speech sounds in the languages of the world, with a focus on their physical aspects (cf. phonologists, studying those sounds with a focus on how these function in a language's grammatical system). The course offers students a grounding in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is the standard instrument internationally for transcribing utterances, and reviews both the mechanisms by which sounds are realized (articulatory phonetics), and the acoustic properties of that realization (acoustic phonetics). In the associated practicum and in regular homework assignments, students practice transcription and listening skills, and are introduced to the analysis of digitized speech with computer software (SIL's Speech Analyzer).

Textbooks
Ladefoged, P. (2005). A Course in Phonetics, 5th Edition. Thomson-Wadsworth.
Johnson, K. (2003). Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics, 2nd Edition. Blackwell.
Pullum, G. K., and Ladusaw, W. A. (1996). Phonetic Symbol Guide, 2nd Edition. Chicago University Press.

72100 Syntax I
Wednesday 4:15 - 6:15 pm, 3 credits, Marcel den Dikken

This course provides an introduction to Principles and Parameters Theory (P&P). A relatively recent development within the framework of Chomsky's Generative Grammar, P&P intends to account for cross-linguistic syntactic variation by pursuing the idea that a pre-determined set of principles underlies the grammars of all languages; the apparent differences we see among languages are the result of parameter settings. Although we will examine similarities and differences between languages, English (and other European languages) will be a main point of reference in our understanding of the theory. This course will also train the student to "do" syntax and to become proficient at engaging in syntactic argumentation!

76500 Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis
Tuesday 4:15 - 6:15pm, 3 credits, Robert Fiengo

Text: Levinson, Stephen. Pragmatics Cambridge University Press.
Reader: Davis, Steven. Pragmatics Oxford University Press.

This course attempts to provide the student with an introduction to the study of language use, concentrating on the seminal books and articles in the field. The readings given below will certainly be covered; other readings will be suggested during the semester. There will be a take-home written exam at the end of the course, consisting of short essays. If, however, the student wishes to write a research paper on some topic covered in the course, that may substitute for the written exam.

1. Preliminaries
   Levinson, Chapter 1
   Strawson, 'On referring'
2. Speech Act Theory
   Levinson, Chapter 5.
   Austin, How to do things with words
   Austin, 'How to talk - some simple ways' in Austin's Philosophical Papers
3. Conversational Implicature
   Levinson, Chapter 6
   Grice, 'Logic and Conversation,' Davis 19.
4. Presupposition
   Levinson, Chapter 4
   Frege, 'On sense and reference'
   Russell, 'On denoting'
   Stalnaker, 'Pragmatic Presuppositions,' Davis 27.
5. Speaker meaning and speaker reference
   Donnellan, Reference and Definite Descriptions, Davis 3
   Kripke, Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference, Davis 5
6. Reference, Anaphora, and Deixis
   Levinson, Chapter 2

78000 Corpus Analysis
Monday 6:30 - 8:30 pm, 3 credits, Martin Chodorow

Text corpora generally provide the data for computational linguistics - data that can be used to build a statistical model of a linguistic phenomenon, to test a theory in psycholinguistics, or to construct a natural language processing tool. The goal of this course is to provide students with the knowledge and skills that are necessary to conduct their own research in computational linguistics. Topics will include elementary probability theory, information theory, and statistics. Students will also be introduced to methods commonly used in analyzing corpora, such as parsing marked-up text, tagging words with parts of speech, developing and evaluating statistical models of language, using lexical databases, and computing similarity among words and documents.

Corpus Analysis is open to graduate students who have had at least one course in programming. Grades will be based on homework assignments, most involving programming, and a term project, which will consist of a proposal, an oral presentation in class, and a written project report.

Required text:
Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing
Christopher D. Manning & Hinrich Schutze
MIT Press, 1999

79100 Introduction to Spanish Syntax
Wednesday 4:15 - 6:15 pm, 3 credits, Ricardo Otheguy
Cross listed with SPAN70500 (taught in Spanish)

The course starts with a presentation of the basic syntactic structures of Spanish as these are analyzed in standard, sentence-based traditional and generative works. It then moves on to consideration of special topics from a functionalist perspective, such as the role of length and information structure in producing favored and disfavored word-order patterns, the role of grammatical meaning in the choice of dative and accusative clitics, the pre- and post-nominal placement of adjectives for message effects, the variable use of subject pronouns, the nature of gender marking, the placement of adverbs. The course also looks at some diachronic processes of grammaticalization and at a few dialectal features, such as the gender-based clitic systems in the Peninsula and the hardening of word order, the erosion of Personal A, and the rise of non-referential subject pronouns in the Caribbean.

Classes are conducted in Spanish.
Some readings are in Spanish, some in English.
Class participation, presentations, papers and exams, are in the language of the student’s choice.

79200 Sociolinguistics
Thursday 11:45am - 1:45pm, 3 credits, Martin Gitterma
Cross listed with SPAN80500

The description for this course will be posted soon. Stay tuned!

79300 Relevance of Medieval Theories/Philosophies of Language
Tuesday 4:15pm -6:15pm, 3 credits, Alex Orentstein
Cross listed with MSCP80500

No period in the history of western intellectual life is closer to the present in its contributions to the study of language than the later middle ages. The aim of this class is to introduce students to discussions of central topics (by figures such as Ockham and Buridan) and their relation to current views. Both periods take a compositional approach wherein more complex language/sentences are treated in terms of their simpler component parts. This is an indispensable theme of authors such as Chomsky and Davidson. These sentences were considered in works on philosophical logic and also in works called Sophismata (The study of sophisms/puzzles/paradoxes.). The method of the latter was to examine opposing sides of a question. Hamlet fresh from a medieval university was using this method when he posed and examined answers to the question: ‘To be or not to be?’.

Compositionality requires that one starts with simple singular sentences such ‘Socrates is human’ and proceeds to more complex ones constructed from them. These are treated in terms of a semantical version of Aristotle’s correspondence theory of truth. A current version is found in Alfred Tarski’s famous paper and is the basis for model theoretic semantical approaches to language (found in texts such as Cherchia and Ginet’s Meaning and Grammar-An Introduction to Semantics). One takes up problematic negative sentences such as ‘That chimera does not exist’. This is the topic of negative existentials. It is also dealt with in works by many current authors, e.g., Meinong, Bertrand Russell, Quine, etc. From there one goes on to general sentences and the treatment of quantifiers, such as ‘All’ and ‘some’. This material is dealt with in current writers such as Quine, Barcan Marcus and Kripke. After that modal sentences and what Bertrand Russell called propositional attitudes. Here is a variation of a sophism: You believe the object coming to you covered in a donkey’s skin is a donkey. The object coming to you is your father. So you believe your father is a donkey. This sophism and others deal with the same question posed by Frege’s morning star-evening star case. Last but not least are discussions of the Liar’s Paradox: [This sentence is false]. Which paradoxically if true, is false and if false, is true. One treatment is known today as ‘The Buridan Peirce solution’ crediting Charles Saunders Peirce for reviving a theme from John Buridan.

79400 Seminar in Spanish Linguistics. Language policy and planning
Wednesday 6:30 - 8:30 pm, 3 credits, José del Valle

This course will offer an overview of both modernist and critical approaches to language policy and planning (LPP). While the former deal with LPP mainly as resource management, the latter focus on the discursive and ideological dimensions of both LPP and its academic treatment. The course will be structured around three major topics: language standardization (including, for example, technical and ideological issues related to orthographic codification, pluricentrism, and the role of language academies), linguistic minorites (including, for example, policies for maintenance or shift and linguistic rights), and language spread (including, for example, policies dealing with the international promotion of English as a foreign language or the status of Spanish as a “foreign?/second?/heritage?” language in the United States). Sample bibliography: Thomas Ricento, ed., (2006), An introduction to language policy: theory and method, Malden, Blackwell; James Milroy and Lesley Milroy (1999), 3rd, Authority in language: investigating standard English, New York, Routledge; Christina Bratt Paulston (1994), Linguistic minorities in multilingual settings: implications for language policies, Philadelphia, John Benjamins; Clare Mar-Molinero and Miranda Stewart, eds., (2006), Globalization and language in the Spanish-speaking world, New York, Palgrave Macmillan.

82100 Seminars in Linguistics: Qualifying Paper Workshop
Monday 2:00 - 4:00 pm, 3 credits, Janet Fodor

The description for this course will be posted soon. Stay tuned!

84100 Seminar: English Dialects Syntax
Monday 4:15 - 6:15pm, 3 credits, Christina Tortora

This course will investigate the syntax of American and British varieties of English (with special attention paid to Appalachian English, African American English, and Belfast English, although numerous other varieties will also be examined). The course will focus on phenomena that distinguish the non-standard varieties from "Standard English," such as non-standard agreement patterns, negative inversion (and other non-standard phenomena with negation), non-standard existential constructions, aspectual markers, and subject contact relatives. Our investigation will be driven in part by current ongoing research on the syntax of English varieties by the instructor, in collaboration with M. den Dikken, J. Bernstein, and R. Zanuttini.

85100 Seminar in Phonology
Thursday 2:00 - 4:00pm, 3 credits, Robert Vago

Exegisis of current and recent work in phonological theory. This course will count as Phonology II if you have not taken it.

73600 Syntax I practicum
Time TBA, Marcel den Dikken

73800 Phonetics Practicum
Monday 6:30 - 8:30pm, Dianne Bradley

Students taking Ling 71100, Linguistic Phonetics, are required to register concurrently in the associated practicum. The practicum offers listening and transcription exercises through which the concepts introduced in class are explored further. Additional exercises offer students hands-on experience in the acoustic analysis of digitally recorded speech, using computer software.