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Linguistics course schedule (graduate).
| LIN480K | Phonology I | |
| LIN380L | Syntax I | |
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LIN381L | Syntax II |
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LIN381S | Semantics |
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LIN384 | Topics in Romance Linguistics |
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LIN386M.2 | Computational Linguistics I |
| LIN391 | Major Works of 20th Century Linguistic Theory | |
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LIN391.1 | Studies in English Phonology |
| LIN392 | Introduction to Language Acquisition | |
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LIN393 | Golden Age in Spain |
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LIN393 | Linguistic Poetics |
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LIN393 | Speech Play and Verbal Art |
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LIN393.4 | Neurolinguistics |
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LIN393.5 | Translation: Theory, History, Practice |
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LIN393P.1 | Typology of Tone Patterns |
| LIN393S | Agreement | |
| LIN393S.1 | Syntactic Representations of Tense, Agreement and Aspect | |
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LIN395 | Conference Course |
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LIN396.1 | Research Methods in Sociolinguistics |
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LIN396 | Turkic Culture & Language in Central Asia |
This course is an introduction to phonology. It covers (1) analysis of phonological distribution and alternation, (2) interaction of phonological processes, (3) syllabification, and (4) stress. Theoretical topics to be discussed will incude metrical representation and Optimality Theory.
Students will practice doing phonological analysis through weekly homework problem sets in which they produce analyses of the patterns in a restricted data set from an actual language. Students will also write a short research paper presenting an analysis of stress or syllabification in a language of their own choice.
LIN 381M
TBA
Readings will be made available in a course packet.
Back to graduate course index
This course is an introduction to generative syntax for graduate students. Emphasis is on the study of syntactic theory. Central notions are developed primarily through the attempt to construct a partial syntax of English. Some material from other languages is considered as well.
Graduate standing
a) homework assignments
b) midterm exam and final exam
c) problem paper
Ouhalla, J. 1994. Introducing Transformational Grammar: From Rules to Principles and Parameters. New York: Edward Arnold.
This course explores various phenomena from natural language syntax from the perspectives of two different theories of syntax, Government and Binding theory (GB) and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The course has the following goals:
(i) To sharpen your analytical tools for exploring the syntax of natural languages.
(ii) To expand your knowledge of GB and introduce you to HPSG.
(ii) To enable you to evaluate and compare syntactic theories.
LIN 380M & LIN 380L
Regular problem sets, readings from the literature, a midterm exam, and a final exam.
No required text.
Optional texts:
Ivan Sag and Thomas Wasow, Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction. Partial draft,
to be published by CSLI Publications. (in Hill Library verticle files)
This course is an introduction into important topics in current research of natural language semantics. It is based on LIN 380M, "Introduction to Semantics", which focused on principles of compositional interpretation, argument structure, modifier constructions, quantifiers, plural reference, the syntax/semantic interface, and the treatment of scope ambiguities, and which introduced technical tools like set theory, type theory and the lambda notation. All this is presupposed by the current course, but can be acquired independently by working through Irene Heim & Angelika Kratzer, "Semantics in Generative Grammar", London: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.
The present course has three parts:
Part I is concerned with phenomena like tense, aspect, modality, vagueness, point
of view, and indexicals. The common denominator of these subjects that natural-language
expressions have to be interpreted with respect to parameters, like the time of utterance.
We will also discuss the semantics of propositoinal attitude verbs in this part.
Part II turns to the interpretation of expressions in text. This includes theories
of anaphoric reference and of presuppositions. In particular, we will discuss Discourse
Representation Theory and other models of so-called "dynamic interpretation".
These theories depart from the traditional truth-conditional view of semantics; their
basic view is that the meaning of a sentence is its potential to change the information
state of a hearer.
Part III addresses the structuring of information in discourse. We will discuss the
semantics of questions and the corresponding semantics of answers in which parts
are highlighted by focus (accent), and we will have a look in the pragmatics of topic-comment
structures.
LIN 380L & LIN 380M (but see note above)
Grading is based on homeworks (50%) and two take-home exams (25% each).
E-mail: krifka@mail.utexas.edu
There is no required textbook. The material is covered in class notes. Occasionally we will read articles or chapters that represent original research; they will be put on reserve. For Part II we will be using parts of Hans Kamp & U. Reyle (1993), From Discourse to Logic, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
See department of French & Italian for description.
Graduate standing
TBA
TBA
This course is intended to familiarize linguistics graduate students with:
(1) the basics of the Unix operating system and the EMACS text editor;
(2) computer fonts;
(3) how to deal with rtf, postscript and PDF files, common formats for informal distribution of papers in linguistics;
(4) Awk, a simple programming language for text analysis, especially useful for large corpora analysis;
(5) a number of existing analytical programs phonological and morphological (lexical) analysis ó such as the TWOL ["two-level"] morphophonological parser, etc.;
(6) the programming language Prolog;
(7) the programming language Common Lisp (including some very limited programming assignments);
(8) a survey of finite-state recognizers and parsers.
The course assumes no prior computational background or skills.
Graduate standing. Syntax I, Phonology I or consent of instructor.
TBA
Clocksin & Mellish, Programming in Prolog
Suggested:
Antworth, PCñKimmo: A TwoñLevel Processor for Morphological Analysis
Touretzky, Common LispñA Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation
This is course is designed to provide students with a solid overview of the major currents of twentieth-century linguistic theory through the original writings of some of the most influential linguists of this period. By way of establishing an intellectual background, we will first examine writings of certain nineteenth-century linguists, namely Humboldt, Baudouin de Courtenay, Whitney, and Osthoff and Brugmann, whose ideas both positively and negatively influenced later thought. We will properly begin with Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, then proceed to read works of Sapir, Whorf, Bloomfield, Jakobson, Chomsky, and Labov. As we move up to the present, a number of dualities pertaining to the nature of human language and how it ought properly to be studied will be considered, e.g. social and individual aspects, synchrony and diachrony, natural and social scientific practice, mental and physical realities, etc. Although there will be some accompanying secondary literature, the emphasis will be on primary texts. Lectures will be based on texts indicated on the syllabus, though students will be assigned other related material.
Graduate standing
There will be no exams. Rather, the final grade will be based three major writing assignments based on the readings, as well as their relationship to students' own personal research interests. Students are welcome to form discussion groups to discuss the questions, though the writing should be an individual exercise. These will be handed in class one week prior to their due date.
1. Chomsky, N. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge. MIT Press.
[ISBN: 0-262-53070-8]
2. de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1983. Course in General Linguistics (translated and edited
by R. Harris). Open Court Press. [ISBN: 0-8126-9023-0]
3. Reader available at Abel's Copies, 1906 Guadalupe, 472-5353.
This course will begin with the basic articulatory and acoustic phonetics of English. We will then proceed with learning the tools of phonological analysis, such as, phonological distribution and alternation, interaction of phonological processes, syllabification, and stress. The course will use these tools to focus on the morphological and phonological structure of English.
Graduate standing
TBA
Ladefoged, A Course in Phonetics.
This course is an introduction to the linguistic and psychological issues involved in the study of how children acquire a first language. Among the topics to be considered are Chomskyís discussion of the problem of language acquisition, the biological basis of language acquisition, infant speech perception, the relationship between language acquisition and the linguistic input to the child, research methods in language acquisition, the acquisition of American Sign Language, and the childís representation of grammatical categories.
Graduate standing
Course requirements will include two research assignments involving the collection and analysis of data, several short "critical commentaries" on the assigned papers, and a final exam.
A packet of readings which will include many key papers in the field.
This course will examine the nature and contents of the Jewish/Hebrew "renaissance" in Spain during the "Golden Age"; the great secular and religious poetic works (from Samuel Hanagid, through Ibn Ezra, Ibn Gabirol, Judah Halvi, Alharizi, et al.), their innovative metrics and poetics, genres and styles, and their relation to Arabic styles and poetics; their contributions to the development of the Hebrew language; advances in grammatical theory; traditional and philological commentaries on the Bible and the Talmudic literature; Rabbinic/Juridical works; Philosophical writings and ideas, and their relation to the Arabic, and the like.
This course will consist of lectures, reading of texts, student reports, class discussion and studentís research papers.
This course should be useful not only for students of Hebrew, but also of Arabic Language and Literature, Middle Eastern Studies, Comparative Literature, Philosophy, Linguistics, Jewish and Comparative Law, and others.
Graduate standing. Students deficient in Hebrew may obtain individual help from Professor Bar-Adon. Please contact him at 471-3594 or 471-1701.
Grades will be based on class participation, regular assignments and class reports, and a term paper.
The Hebrew Bible
This class deals with speech play, verbal art, and poetics from linguistic and anthropological points of view. This typically includes such speech types as puns, jokes, play languages, proverbs, riddles, verbal dueling, narrative, myth, song, poetry, and ritual and theatrical performance; and employs such formal features as parallelism, rhyme, alliteration, meter, prosodic distortion, and versification, and such literary tropes as iconicity, imagery, metaphor, metonymy, and quotation. Our point is that these elements and structures of 'typical' speech play are broadly characteristic of all speech, including even conversation and expository prose; and that their study in heightened, artistic contexts provides the proper framework for any linguistic or anthropological approach to both form and content in naturally-occurring speech activity.
For linguistics, such a framework raises the crucial issue of the limits of grammatical knowledge and competence, as against a more general competence for poetics and discourse. That is, have our grammatical theories attempted to account for elements more properly belonging to poetics, such as parallelism in gapping and respectively constructions; meter/versification in the postlexical 'prosodic hierarchy'; or imagistic tropes in reduplicative and echo forms? And can we do better by accounting for these phenomena alongside related poetic phenomena? For anthropology and the study of speech activity as social behavior, this approach offers a framework within which to organize the formal structures discovered in empirical investigations, running a gamut from the unconscious poetic organization found in natural conversation (e.g., turn-taking systems) to the highly conscious poetic organization of a Shakespearian sonnet, or of a disguised speech game.
The class will have an analytic, empirical orientation. Apart from discussions of weekly readings, classes will concentrate on the analysis of oral, videotaped, and written materials provided at first by the instructors but later by students, from their own research. Issues of transcription, written representation, and translation will be addressed. The approach will be cross-cultural and ethnographic in orientation.
Students should consult with the instructors before registering for the course. Students are expected bring to bear on classwork a background in either Linguistics or Anthropology. We define this practically as having taken (or taking concurrently) three graduate courses in Anthropology, Linguistics (core courses only), or comparable linguistics courses from any of the following language departments: Germanic, French and Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, Slavic languages, Classics, or English. If all three courses are in Anthropology, at least one of them should be in Linguistic Anthropology.
Homework (30%), Final paper (70%)
None (Reserve readings only)
This class deals with speech play, verbal art, and poetics from linguistic and anthropological points of view. This typically includes such speech types as puns, jokes, play languages, proverbs, riddles, verbal dueling, narrative, myth, song, poetry, and ritual and theatrical performance; and employs such formal features as parallelism, rhyme, alliteration, meter, prosodic distortion, and versification, and such literary tropes as iconicity, imagery, metaphor, metonymy, and quotation. Our point is that these elements and structures of 'typical' speech play are broadly characteristic of all speech, including even conversation and expository prose; and that their study in heightened, artistic contexts provides the proper framework for any linguistic or anthropological approach to both form and content in naturally-occurring speech activity.
For linguistics, such a framework raises the crucial issue of the limits of grammatical knowledge and competence, as against a more general competence for poetics and discourse. That is, have our grammatical theories attempted to account for elements more properly belonging to poetics, such as parallelism in gapping and respectively constructions; meter/versification in the postlexical 'prosodic hierarchy'; or imagistic tropes in reduplicative and echo forms? And can we do better by accounting for these phenomena alongside related poetic phenomena? For anthropology and the study of speech activity as social behavior, this approach offers a framework within which to organize the formal structures discovered in empirical investigations, running a gamut from the unconscious poetic organization found in natural conversation (e.g., turn-taking systems) to the highly conscious poetic organization of a Shakespearian sonnet, or of a disguised speech game.
The class will have an analytic, empirical orientation. Apart from discussions of weekly readings, classes will concentrate on the analysis of oral, videotaped, and written materials provided at first by the instructors but later by students, from their own research. Issues of transcription, written representation, and translation will be addressed. The approach will be cross-cultural and ethnographic in orientation.
Students should consult with the instructors before registering for the course. Students are expected bring to bear on classwork a background in either Linguistics or Anthropology. We define this practically as having taken (or taking concurrently) three graduate courses in Anthropology, Linguistics (core courses only), or comparaable linguistics courses from any of the following language departments: Germanic, French and Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, Slavic languages, Classics, or English. If all three courses are in Anthropology, at least one of them should be in Linguistic Anthropology.
Homework (30%), Final paper (70%)
None (Reserve readings only)
Neurolinguistics is a survey-type course that explores subject areas related to the neurobiological representation of language in the brain. It begins with a complete review of basic neuroanatomy. Topics then include: cortical areas involved in language (brain stimulation studies); subcortical areas involved in language; a description of recent work on aphasia emphasizing what can be learned about language representation from empirical study of aphasic language vis-a-vis area of lesion; hemispheric specialization for language. The last topic includes anatomical differences of left and right hemispheres, split-brain subjects, bilingual speakers, and bilingual aphasics.
Graduate standing.
TBA
Outside reading list and note packet.
This seminar concentrates on various historical, theoretical, and practical aspects of translation. Among the topics to be covered:
Graduate standing.
Assigned and optional readings, class discussion, oral reports, and a term paper.
A list of required and optional texts will be provided in class.
Optimality Theory (OT) is inherently based on typology, since markedness constraints express crosslinguistic tendencies. OT contraints are supposed to have crosslinguistic validity, and this can only be established by crosslinguistic comparison.
In this class we will explore the crosslinguistic trends in one particular empirical domain: patterns in the distribution of tones. We will discuss OT analyses of tone patterns, striving for a system of constraints that captures the range of tonal phenomena.
Beyond establishing which constraints would be useful, we should also ask why the constraints are the way they are. What makes the marked structures marked, and what distinguishing them from unmarked structures? Assuming a functionalist perspective, we will explore motivations for tonal constraints drawn from work on speech production and speech perception.
Students will each focus on the tone patterns of a particular language. Each student will write a paper presenting an OT analysis of those patterns, using constraints with crosslinguistic motivation. Students will also present their data and analyses in class.
From the students, the instructor and the readings, we will hopefully have a reasonably broad sample of the world's tone patterns. By pooling what we find in our respective focus languages, we should be able to piece together a picture of markedness in tone systems - a broader picture than any of us could get on our own. The goal of the class will be a limited collective set of markedness constraints and faithfulness constraints that can be ranked to account for tone patterns in a broad variety of languages.
Graduate standing
TBA
Readings will be put on reserve in the Hill Library.
(Listed as Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar in course schedule - topic has changed.)
Broadly defined, agreement is the systematic covariation of linguistic forms. This course will investigate a variety of agreement phenomena in natural language, including: verb-argument agreement (e.g. subject-verb, object-verb), concord (e.g. determiner-noun, adjective-noun), and pronoun-antecedent agreement, as well as more exotic types such as definiteness agreement, subject-object agreement (object agrees with subject!), and wh-agreement. As we will see, agreement has important implications for the representation of morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. These are some of the specific issues we will address:
Armed with questions such as those above, we will attempt to move towards a general theory of agreement which answers more basic questions such as: What is agreement? Or, to put it differently: How is agreement represented in the minds of speakers? Why do languages have it at all?
Graduate standing; Syntax II or consent of instructor.
Class presentations and a term paper.
Selected articles from the linguistics literature. Following is a
partial
list of sources. Students wishing to do advance reading could start with
Ferguson and Barlow's 'Introduction' in Barlow and Ferguson 1988.
Barlow, Michael. 1992. A Situated Theory of Agreement. (1988 Stanford PhD
Dissertation). New York: Garland Publishing.
Barlow, Michael, and Charles Ferguson. 1988. Agreement in Natural Language.
Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Bosch, Peter. 1987. Pronouns under control? A reply to Liliane Tasmowski
and Paul Verluyten. Journal of Semantics 5:65-78.
Bresnan, Joan, and Sam A. Mchombo. 1987. Topic, pronoun, and agreement in
Chichewa. Language 63 (4):741-782.
Corbett, Greville. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dowty, David, and Pauline Jacobson. 1988. Agreement as a Semantic
Phenomenon. Paper read at Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, 1989.
Pollard, Carl, and Ivan Sag. 1994. Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.
Stanford and Chicago: CSLI Publications and University of Chicago Press.
(Chapter 2, 'Agreement')
Tasmowski-DeRijk, Liliane, and Paul Verluyten. 1982. Linguistic control of
pronouns. Journal of Semantics 1:323-346.
Wechsler, Stephen, and Larisa Zlatic. 1997. (Dis)agreement in
Serbo-Croatian. Manuscript, University of Texas, Austin.
Tense and Agreement have been argued to appear in different head complexes in some analyses and in a single syntactic node in others. It has been noted that syntactically aspectual information about situation type and temporal viewpoint can be expressed in a given sentence (Smith 1991) and that Aspect plays a major role in many languages. This course considers the ways in which Tense, Agreement and Aspect interact with the syntax and investigates the ways in which these elements may be instantiated in the phrase structure. In addressing these issues, we focus on topics such as the following:
1) Tense, Agreement and Aspect(ual) properties that are grammaticalized in languages
2) Aspectual properties of argument structure
3) Structural relations between Tense, Modality and Aspect and the verb, in which Tense and Modality are farther away from the verb and Aspect is closer to it
4) Aspect as a bundle of features attached to the verb
5) Typological differences between constructions which consist of an auxiliary inflected for Tense and Agreement and a main verb inflected for Aspect and constructions which consist of only a main verb inflected for all three elements
This course also considers data in American Sign language, in which overt phrasal markers are postulated for temporal aspect which applies to verb stems and also to longer sequences (Metlay and Supalla 1995).
It has been argued that there is a relationship between the occurrence of null subjects and morphological uniformity and agreement properties in languages. Some languages with weak morphological properties and rich aspectual properties allow null subjects. This course investigates the possible syntactic representations of Tense, Agreement and Aspect in such languages and considers the way the agreement relation is expressed in the absence of morphological properties.
In general, this course raises basic questions about the autonomy of syntax and connections between syntax and semantics. It also addresses issues about parameters that may be responsible for major characteristics of linguistic variation and typology.
Graduate standing and consent of the instructor. Contact instructor (Dr. Lisa Green: lgreen@mail.utexas.edu) if you are interested in the course but have a time conflict.
1) Research paper
2) Two presentations: a) presentation of current research/journal article related
to the study of Tense, Aspect
and Agreement, b) presentation of work in progress (on research paper for the course)
Binnick, R. 1991. Time and the Verb: A Guide to Tense and
Aspect. New York: Oxford.
Jaeggli, O. and K. Safir. 1989. The Null Subject Parameter. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Metlay, D. and T. Supalla. 1995. "Morphosyntactic Structure of Aspect and Number
Inflections in ASL." In Language, Gesture, and Space, (eds.) K. Emmorey
and J. Reilly.
New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Ouhalla, J. 1991. Functional Categories and Parametric Variation. New York:
Routledge. Tenny, Carol. 1994. Aspectual Roles and the Syntax-Semantics Interface.
Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
Smith, Carlota. 1997. The Parameter of Aspect. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Individual instruction. Prerequisites: Graduate standing. Consent of instructor must be obtained. Requirements: You must have the prior written consent of the instructor before you register for or add this course. Graduate Conference Course Agreement forms are available in Calhoun 508. Please see Kathy Ross, Graduate Coordinator, for information.
This course is designed to survey the research methods used in sociolinguistics with a focus on issues relating to work in the quantitative (i.e. Labovian) paradigm and in what Brown and Levinson have termed applied pragmatics. Much time is devoted to discussion of issues relating to working with variable data collected in naturalistic settings. Consequently, we will deal with the theoretical and practical issues involved in sampling, interviewing, defining social and linguistic variables, describing style-shifting and code-switching, and analyzing variable data. Readings during the early part of the semester will provide students with an understanding of both the historical development of the field and current research questions. Our reading of Brown and Levinson will permit us to think about theory-driven approaches to issues of pragmatics. Throughout the term, discussions of the readings will consider two issues: first, the appropriateness and usefulness of the methods of data collection and analysis employed and, second, the contributions of the findings to an understanding of what Labov has termed "the orderly heterogeneity of language."
Doctoral students. LIN 380S and consent of instructor. This course is not a substitute for 380S; rather, it begins where 380S left off, preparing students to do work in the field. If you have questions about your preparation for the course, please speak with the instructor before the first class meeting.
Requirements for the course include (1) a series of short papers (e.g., a concept paper, a revision of that paper, an analysis of ethical issues involved in your proposed research) leading to a formal research proposal and the appropriate forms for clearance from the Universityís Internal Review Board, which oversees ethics in research, (2) a series of exercises designed to provide hands-on experience transcribing and coding data and using the VARBRUL program, (3) an optional mid-term and a final, and (4) class participation.
Students wishing to do a qualifying paper in sociolinguistics are welcome as are students who plan to use sociolinguistic methods in their dissertation. Assignments can be adapted should there be students who want to analyze data they have already collected.
Brown & Levinson, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage
Milroy, Observing and Analyzing Natural Language
The Turkic peoples and their culture dominate the Central Asian scene. They were the largest non-Slavic minority in the Soviet Union, and their culture resisted Slavic cultural dominance to a much greater degree than was anticipated. But these Muslim peoples are also important for an understanding of the Middle East, for they have close linguistic ties with Turkey, and their history is closely intertwined with that of the Iranians and the Arabs.
This seminar surveys the Turkic peoples, languages, and cultures of Central Asia. The primary content will be the Uzbek languages, but there will be some discussion of the historical and cultural setting in order to place the languages, in proper context. For those students who decide by (by the second class meeting) to pursue an emphasis on language there will be weekly exercises and two or three short exams, which will serve as the chief basis for grading.
For those students who wish to emphasize the historical and cultural component (e.g., religion, family life, literature, or the political scene) a special set of readings will be assigned, and a research paper will be required. Such students will be expected to participate in the sessions on language for the first 6 or 8 weeks in order to gain an understanding of the stucture of the Turkic languages, but they will not be graded on this.
Graduate standing.
See above.
Elizabeth E. Bacon, Central Asians Under Russian Rule: A Study in
Cultural Change, 1980.
Khayrulla Ismarulla, Literary Uzbek, Part 1, 1994.
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