Minor Core

Introduces the student to the commonly shared (or typological) features of morphology, syntax, and phonology of the world's languages. Students will have many problem sets containing data from dozens of languages.

This course provides an introduction to formal linguistic approaches to the study of meaning. Topics include quantifiers, scope, definite descriptions, anaphora, tense and aspect, knowledge of meaning, metalanguages and the syntax-semantics interface.

Considers the sound structure of a wide variety of human languages, with the aim of finding principles that describe in an insightful way the properties of their sounds and sound patterns. In addition the course will introduce the student to the higher level organizational principles governing the combinations of sounds into morphemes, words, and phrases.

Students in this course will become familiar with the latest developments in phonetic science. They will become familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, and at the end of the course they will be able to write with a high degree of confidence any English word or phrase. They will learn about the prosodic properties of English that play a crucial role in determining the phonetic structure of English. There is also a serious laboratory component of this course and students will carry out sophisticated instrumental experiments that bear on current issues in phonetic theory.

Fundamentals of syntactic analysis. Central notions of generative grammar. Aspects of the structure of English and other languages.