Linguistics

This course introduces students to the major areas of linguistics: dialects, syntax, semantics, psycholinguistics, and pragmatics. Special emphasis is placed on syntax and semantics. The format will be a seminar, with significant board work. Student assessment will be in the form of quizzes, a mid-term, and a final exam.

This course introduces students to psycholinguistics, giving special attention to first and second language acquisition, literacy, mental models, neural networks, and the representation of meaning. It explores the dominant theories in the field, such as language universals, conceptual blending, and connectionism. This course also provides an overview of the relation between mind and language. The format will be a seminar, with significant board work. Student assessment will be in the form of quizzes, a mid-term, and a final exam.

This course will examine English syntax, focusing on phrase-structure grammar, transformational-generative grammar and its related minimalist program, and cognitive grammar. Students will explore the historical development of each approach to syntax and study the related methods of syntactic analysis. The course will build on syntactic topics covered in Linguistics 100, Introduction to Linguistics. The format will be a seminar, with significant board work. Student assessment will be in the form of quizzes, a mid-term, and a final exam.