academics

Fall 2006 schedule

Download the course schedule in PDF

82100 Seminars in Linguistics: Qualifying Paper Workshop
Monday 4:15 - 6:15 pm, 3 credits, Dianne Bradley

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

79100 Special Topics in Linguistics: Linguistics & Clutural Issues in Teaching Spanish
Monday 4:15 - 6:15 pm, 3 credits, Laura Callahan
Cross listed with SPAN70700 (taught in Spanish)

Students in this course will become conversant with current issues in the profession of teaching Spanish in the U.S. at the college level. The main areas to be covered are: theoretical perspectives on second language acquisition, pedagogical methods, the teaching of culture, and the teaching of Spanish to native speakers. Topics within these areas will include, among others, communicative language teaching, student-centered learning, CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning), service learning, Spanish across the curriculum, Spanish for the professions, and bidialectalism. [This course will be conducted in Spanish.

84600 Seminar in Semantics: Events
Monday 6:30 - 8:30 pm, 3 credits, William McClure
Course website

What are events, exactly? And what, if anything, is the relationship between events (in the real world) and events in linguistics? In beginning to answer these questions, we will look at events as metaphysical objects, as algebraic objects, and as syntax.

73800 Phonetics Practicum
Monday 6:30 - 8:30 pm, 3 credits, Dianne Bradley

76500 Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis
Tuesday 2:00 - 4:00 pm, 3 credits, Robert Fiengo

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

86100 Seminar in Second Language Acquisition: Reading in a non-native language
Tuesday 4:15 - 6:15 pm, 3 credits, Elaine C. Klein

The focus of this seminar will be non-native language (NNL) reading
development. We will read and discuss recent research related to such
questions as the following:

• What is the relationship between native language (NL) and NNL reading skills? Relatedly: to what extent can second language learners with minimal NL reading skills learn to read successfully in the NNL (i.e. with or without NL support)?
• Are the prerequisite skills for beginning older NNL readers the same as those for emergent NL readers (e.g. phonemic awareness).
• To what extent and how are NL reading processes transferred to NNL reading and what are some of the consequences? Relatedly: how are orthographic and phonological processes affected when NL and NNL differ orthographically? • What are the relative contributions of NL and NNL lexical and syntactic knowledge/processing on NNL reading?
• To what extent and how does input modification (e.g. lexical and/or syntactic) affect NNL reading?
• What is the relationship between NNL listening comprehension (i.e. aural skills) and NNL reading?

Other questions and topics related to NNL reading development can be included, depending on the interests of the class.

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

(this course description is from Fall 2005 and is subject to revision) This introductory course is designed for students in linguistics with no necessary background in cognitive or 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 are also concerned with how the language faculty interfaces with other cognitive domains. We focus on the variety of mental structures and processes supporting the adult native speaker’s primary language behaviors — comprehension and production — and on the coordination of these processes in real time. Selected topics in acquisition (including acquisition of literacy) are also included, but receive briefer coverage. In every class, we emphasize the issues of experimental method and design that are standard in research gathering evidence about language behavior. The aim is to build towards the intricate skills set necessary for the conduct of a research project of one’s own. At the very least, the course equips students to appreciate fine detail in reports of current research in the field, at a level sufficient for considered judgments about scientific merit.

78100 Methods in Computational Linguistics
Wednesday 4:15 - 6:15 pm, 3 credits, William Sakas

This course will introduce several core techniques of contemporary computational linguistics. From Google to arguments both for and against Universal Grammar, computers and linguistics are becoming more and more entwined. Whether or not you intend to concentrate in computational linguistics, this course will provide hands-on experience with computational tools that are relevant to many subfields of theoretical linguistics, and to linguistic applications in industry.

The main thrust of the course will be an introduction to computer programming in the Perl programming language. In addition, some very basic mathematical methods from probability, information theory and computational learning theory will be presented and related to both contemporary theoretical linguistic analysis and existing linguistically-based software applications.
The course welcomes students with little or no mathematical or computational experience and will provide necessary background material. A one-hour practicum will run parallel to this course which will provide exposure to many of the often frustrating, hands-on intricacies of computer programming beyond what is covered during lecture; the practicum will be held in a computer lab at a time to be scheduled.

The course will provide a valuable background for future computational linguistics courses and a computational linguistics concentration. For example, Computational Language Learning (Spring, 2007), and Corpus Analysis, both highly recommend that this course be taken first, etc.
Students already possessing programming experience may take the course as a 'projects course' in which they will become involved in original research endeavors and/or read and duplicate existing, seminal studies in computational linguistics.

70100 Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics
Wednesday 4:15 - 6:15 pm, 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.!

72100 Syntax I
Wednesday 6:30 - 8:30 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!

71400 Phonology II
Thursday 2:00 - 4:00 pm, 3 credits, Robert Vago/ Charles Cairns

Exegisis of current and recent work in phonological theory.

79200 Special Topics in Linguistics: Studies in Hispanic Sociolinguistics: Language in Nationalist Discourse
Thursday 6:30 - 8:30 pm, 3 credits, Jose Delvalle
Cross listed with SPAN80100

In this seminar we will examine the role of language and languages in the elaboration of nationalist discourses and theories of nationalism (e.g. Anderson, Hobsbawm, Smith). We will approach the topic with the theoretical and methodological tools of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, Van Dijk, Wodak) and language policy studies (Haugen, Heller, Fishman, Ricento, Wright). [This seminar will be conducted in English.

71100 Introduction to Linguistic Phonetics
Thursday 2:00 - 4:00 pm, 3 credits, Dianne Bradley
Cross listed with SPCH79600
Course website

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

86600 Seminar in Bilingualism: Studies in Bilingualism
Thursday 11:45 - 1:45 pm, 3 credits, Martin Gitterman
Cross listed with SPCH80500

This course will involve reading and analyzing articles/chapters representative of the various areas of the discipline of bilingualism. Students will be expected to develop not only an understanding of the work of the major researchers/scholars working in bilingualism, but to offer their insights regarding the major controversies in the field. Weekly sessions will generally be devoted to an in-depth analysis of pre-assigned readings. Among the many questions to be considered are:

1. How does one define bilingual? bidialectal?
2, How, if at all, do the languages we speak affect the way we think/perceive?
3. How do children and adults differ in language learning?
4. How are languages organized in the brain?
5. What is bilingual education? How does it differ from ESL instruction? Which program(s) should be required of students?
6. What insights are gained by studying bilingualism within an international framework?

71500 Morphology
Thursday 6:30 - 8:30 pm, 3 credits, Marcel den Dikken

Course description
This course will offer a comprehensive overview of the major theories of morphology in the field, with particular reference to the interfaces between morphology and phonology, and between morphology and syntax. Starting out from the debates between strong and weak lexicalism (culminating in Chomsky’s 1970 ‘Remarks on nominalization’) and the classic Kiparskian level-ordered morphology/phonology model, the course will work its way to current theories of morphology, including Anderson’s (1992) ‘a-morphous morphology’, Aronoff’s (1994) ‘morphology by itself’ and Halle & Marantz’s (1993) ‘distributed morphology’, as well as approaches to morphology which deny morphology independent status as a module of the theory and perform both inflectional and derivational word formation in the syntax (the strongly non-lexicalist model of Baker 1988), and the revival of strong lexicalism in Chomsky’s (1995) minimalism.

Students registering for this course are expected to have successfully completed their coursework for Syntax I (LING 72100), but no prior knowledge of phonology or more advanced syntax will be presupposed.

As textbooks providing background reading on morphological theory and the issues in the interfaces between morphology and syntax/phonology, Spencer (1991) and Aronoff & Fudeman (2004) may be consulted.

Literature
I. Textbooks
Aronoff, Mark & Kirsten Fudeman (2004). What is Morphology? Oxford: Blackwell.
Spencer, Andrew (1991). Morphological Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

II. Primary literature
Anderson, Stephen (1992). A-Morphous Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Aronoff, Mark (1976). Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Aronoff, Mark (1994). Morphology by Itself: Stems and Inflectional Classes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baker, Mark (1988). Incorporation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chomsky, Noam (1970). Remarks on Nominalization. In R.A. Jacobs & P.S. Rosenbaum (eds), Readings in English Transformational Grammar. Waltham: Ginn & Co. 184–221.
Halle, Morris & Alec Marantz (1993). Distributed Morphology. In K. Hale & S.J. Keyser (eds), The View from Building 20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 111–76.
Lapointe, Steven, Diane Brentari & Patrick Farrell (eds) (1998). Morphology and Its Relation to Phonology and Syntax. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Spencer, Andrew & Arnold Zwicky (eds) (1998). The Handbook of Morphology. Oxford: Blackwell.

73600 Syntax I practicum
Time TBA, Marcel den Dikken

73700 Phonology II practicum
Time TBA, Robert Vago/ Charles Cairns