Foundation - PHD

This course focuses on the methodological issues involved in doing linguistic analysis of syntactic, morphological and phonological phenomena and in constructing valid and convincing argumentation about the nature of linguistic theory. Emphasis will be placed on the methodology of testing empirical claims, on the critical evaluation of theoretical explanations, and on developing logically and rhetorically convincing professional analysis.

This course introduces students to the basic techniques for documentation, analysis and description of a language in the field. Topics will include (but are not limited to): ethical issues in language documentation, basic recording and transcription techniques, phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic elicitation, narrative and (if possible) discourse documentation. Students will work with a native speaker consultant of an unfamiliar language, both in a group setting and one-on-one.

Students will learn to use the statistical methods common in linguistics and related fields in order to apply them in the design and analysis of their own research. Methods covered will include ANOVA, ANCOVA, correlation, regression, and non-parametric tests, as well as some specialized analyses such as Multidimensional Scaling Analysis. The course will focus primarily on methods and problems of psycholinguistic, phonetic, and sociolinguistic research.

A survey of the aims of linguistic research and introduction to the basic mathematics of formal linguistics; logic, sets, algebra, graphs, feature structures, formal language theory.