Courses

This course introduces students to language change. It considers how and why languages change and the role of language contact. It also presents different theories and methodologies useful for historical and comparative linguistic investigation. Students will investigate a number of related existing languages from language families around the world, and seek to reconstruct substantial elements of earlier proto-language stages in terms of phonology, morphology, lexicon, and historical dialectology.

This course explores the rich variety of morphological and syntactic constructions and processes found in human language, deepening the students' understanding of morphosyntactic phenomena from a typological perspective. The topics are examined within the framework of a current theory of syntax.

This course introduces the students to the rudiments of linguistic and sociolinguistic survey. The focus is on purpose-driven language survey design and appropriate subsequent reporting of the findings. Consideration is given to current issues in social science research such as the ethics of sampling, and statistical significance of sample populations.

This course introduces students to theories of second language and second culture acquisition. Students develop and evaluate self-directed strategies based on personal learning styles. Practical experience in the above topics is gained by working with a speaker of a non-Indo-European-language

Prepares linguists and literacy workers to guide speakers of an unwritten language to develop an orthography that will accurately represent the sound system of the language, be acceptable to the speakers of the language, and be easily learned for reading and writing the language. This includes consideration of both linguistic and sociolinguistic factors, and representation of non-segmental features such as tone. Although the focus is on alphabetic scripts, non-Roman scripts, including syllabic and logographic, are also considered.

This course introduces students to fundamental principles of acoustics that are relevant to the study of human speech sounds. Students gain a basic understanding of properties of speech sound waves and learn to investigate these properties instrumentally using acoustic analysis software. Students gain extensive practice interpreting acoustic displays such as waveform graphs, fundamental frequency graphs, and spectrograms. A major focus of the course is the effective use of these displays as an aid to correctly transcribing speech sounds and understanding their phonetic properties in the context of descriptive phonetic and/or phonological fieldwork. Significant attention is also given to the complex interrelationships among acoustic, articulatory, and perceptual correlates of speech sounds.

Practical methodology for managing, analyzing, and describing language data. Working with a native speaker of a non-Indo-European language, students gain experience in the ethics of fieldwork, techniques of data collection and recording, analysis using the scientific method, and the use of linguistic software.

This course introduces crucial concepts in anthropology and ethnography to linguists. It focuses on cross-cultural communication with an emphasis on participant observation as an effective methodology for such research. Students collect and analyze data related to topics such as oral traditions, kinship, and social structure. They are introduced to various tools for ethno-semantic analysis, including analysis of cultural themes and worldview, semantic domain analysis, and taxonomic analysis.

The issues in community literacy work that are covered in this course include various program issues such as introducing literacy in an oral community, motivation for literacy, capacity building and sustainability, training of personnel and evaluation of the program, and using participatory approaches in all aspects of the program.