Fall Term Schedule
Fall 2025
| Number | Title | Instructor | Time |
|---|
|
LING 406-1
Sarah Higley
TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM
|
|
English is a banquet of words. And language is political. How do changes in English represent and affect culture? Inflicted by invasions and adaptations it remained English. Brought to Britain by Germanic tribes in the 5th century, it was matured by violent and peaceful contact with other peoples and ideas. Few other languages are so accepting of neologism, so humongous in vocabulary, so malleable of construction. We鈥檒l peruse texts from Old, Middle and Modern English and watch it grow from a Teutonic tongue to the powerful, ductile, and eclectic instrument it is today, spreading to other continents, colonizing and absorbing. We鈥檒l peruse linguistic Angst and jouissance by King Alfred, Aelfric, Robert of Gloucester, Chaucer, Caxton, Mulcaster, Shakespeare, Swift, Johnson, Webster, Orwell and others who praise or blame our shifty English, or who MANIPULATE it?. We鈥檒l grok urban dialects, vernaculars, slang, texting, gender. Is it 鈥渂ased on鈥 or 鈥渂ased off of鈥? 鈥渓ie鈥 or 鈥渓ay鈥? What鈥檚 the deal with register? Vernacular vs. high-falutin鈥 鈥渁cademic鈥 English? Are you down with this? Grads welcome!
|
|
LING 410-01
Ur Staff
MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM
|
|
The goal of this course is to provide a background for understanding the principles that underlie the structure of sound systems in human languages. Starting with the notion phoneme, the course focuses on acoustic and articulatory phonetics, as a basis for understanding phonological processes and change in linguistic sound forms. Students will acquire skills in the production, recognition, and transcription of sounds in various languages of the world. The course will serve as a foundation for work in language documentation, sociolinguistics and sociophonetics, morphology.
|
|
LING 414-01
Aaron White
MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM
|
|
This course provides an introduction to probability and statistics for linguistics, serving as an essential foundation for linguistics students who aim to analyze experimental and corpus linguistic data. Topics include (i) elementary probability theory; (ii) elementary descriptive and inferential statistics; (iii) elementary machine learning concepts; and (iv) fixed and mixed effects models. Concepts are explored through聽linguistic case studies, including the analysis of formally collected judgment data, reaction times, and acoustic measurements.
|
|
LING 415-1
Nadine Grimm
TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM
|
|
About 2,000 of the world鈥檚 7,000 languages are spoken in Africa. The diversity that characterizes these languages is exceptional, but little known to non-specialists. In this course, we will learn about the languages of Africa: the diversity of their linguistic structures (including famous features that are found nowhere else, e.g. click consonants), their history and the history of their speakers (from ca 10,000 BP to the (post-) colonial period), and their cultural contexts, among other topics. We will explore the wealth and diversity of African cultures through the lens of language. This course also incorporates a variety of other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, history, archaeology, human genetics, as well as the arts, to bring to light the variety of institutions, norms, and social practices produced by African societies which have historically been excluded from dominant cultural narratives. The focus will be on the role played by language in these institutions, norms and practices, and their representation. This course has no prerequisites and is open to anyone with an interest in African languages or the African continent.
|
|
LING 425-01
Scott Grimm
TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM
|
|
This course introduces students to the basics of the analysis of meaning in natural language. The first section focuses on devices that motivate certain forms to take on the meanings they have. The second section of the course moves on to discuss how meanings combine to form meanings for larger unitshow words and phrases combine to form sentences meanings. Using logical notation we illustrate the formal analysis of natural language meaning in terms of truth-conditions. We will discuss the basics of set theory, and investigate how meanings represented in these terms correlate with the syntactic and lexical structures of sentences of natural language. Students of graduate standing or those with strong formal backgrounds may consider starting with LIN 265/465 instead, for which this course is ordinarily a prerequisite.
|
|
LING 426-01
Mary Moroney
TR 11:05AM - 12:20PM
|
|
The course examines the structure and definition of the linguistic unit 'word'' its typology and the relationship of the morphological component to other levels in the grammar. The course includes an introduction to analytical techniques with emphasis placed on an examination of data from a range of languages. The building blocks of words will be analyzed and topics such as affixation, reduplication and inflectional and derivational morphology will be covered. We will examine the properties of words and how they fit into the larger structure of linguistic knowledge, including the relationship between words and syntactic structure (ex., phrases and sentences) and the relationship between words and phonological structure (ex., phonological rules and prosodic structure).
|
|
LING 440-01
Maya Abtahian
TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM
|
|
This course offers an overview of the study of language variation and change. We will examine some of the ways that spoken language varies according to the social characteristics and social motivations of its speakers. Methods for quantitative analysis of linguistic variation will be introduced.
|
|
LING 445-1
Jens Kipper
TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM
|
|
The goal of the course is to examine a number of central philosophical problems about language (including the nature of linguistic meaning and its relation to truth, reference, communication, and necessity), while exploring the connections between these problems and issues in and about philosophy more generally.
|
|
LING 460-01
Joanna Pietraszko
MW 3:25PM - 4:40PM
|
|
This course picks up where LING 420 leaves off, though focusing more on topics in natural language syntax from a cross-linguistic perspective. The goal of the course is an approach to syntax that accounts for both language-particular as well as universal constraints on language. Among the topics studied are head and phrase movement, constraints on co-reference (anaphora), ellipsis, and agreement (phi features).
|
|
LING 470-1
Nadine Grimm
TR 9:40AM - 10:55AM
|
|
This class is addressed to anyone interested in fieldwork involving data collection of spoken language, including for instance linguists, anthropologists, or historians. Languages and cultures are currently disappearing on an unprecedented level due to the effects of globalization and displacement of people. Minority groups are often the most affected. As languages and cultures die, we lose entire knowledge systems and communities an integral part of their identity. This class introduces you to major techniques and tools of collecting and curating language data, using it for your research purposes, and making it useful to speech communities and other scholars. We will investigate the importance of language as a social convention from an interdisciplinary perspective, including, e.g., issues in intercultural research and ethics in fieldwork. Students will design their own projects, depending on their personal interests, and receive hands-on training in audio and video recording, time-aligned annotations, data management, and archiving.
|
|
LING 482-01
C.M. Downey
MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM
|
|
This course covers advanced topics in computational linguistics, with a focus on the deployment of deep learning methods for advancing linguistic theory as well as the use of linguistic theory for designing deep learning models. Topics include phonotactic, morphological, and syntactic grammar induction as well as morphological, syntactic and semantic parsing.
|
|
LING 491-3
Scott Grimm
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course is for master's students that have made arrangements with a faculty member to complete readings and discussion in a particular subject in their field of study.
|
|
LING 491-5
–
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course is for master's students that have made arrangements with a faculty member to complete readings and discussion in a particular subject in their field of study.
|
|
LING 491-6
Joanna Pietraszko
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course is for master's students that have made arrangements with a faculty member to complete readings and discussion in a particular subject in their field of study.
|
|
LING 491-7
Aaron White
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course is for master's students that have made arrangements with a faculty member to complete readings and discussion in a particular subject in their field of study.
|
|
LING 495-1
Joyce McDonough
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides master鈥檚 students with the opportunity to conduct, develop, and refine their research projects. Students will engage in research relevant to their field of study and make progress toward completing their degrees.
|
|
LING 495-2
Scott Grimm
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides master鈥檚 students with the opportunity to conduct, develop, and refine their research projects. Students will engage in research relevant to their field of study and make progress toward completing their degrees.
|
|
LING 495-3
Nadine Grimm
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides master鈥檚 students with the opportunity to conduct, develop, and refine their research projects. Students will engage in research relevant to their field of study and make progress toward completing their degrees.
|
|
LING 495-5
–
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides master鈥檚 students with the opportunity to conduct, develop, and refine their research projects. Students will engage in research relevant to their field of study and make progress toward completing their degrees.
|
|
LING 495-6
Joanna Pietraszko
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides master鈥檚 students with the opportunity to conduct, develop, and refine their research projects. Students will engage in research relevant to their field of study and make progress toward completing their degrees.
|
|
LING 495-7
Aaron White
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides master鈥檚 students with the opportunity to conduct, develop, and refine their research projects. Students will engage in research relevant to their field of study and make progress toward completing their degrees.
|
|
LING 527-01
Joyce McDonough
MW 2:00PM - 3:15PM
|
|
The goal of LING 527 is to acquire a basic understanding of fundamental components of the architecture of spoken language characterized as the prosodic hierarchy. the interaction of related suprasegmental phenomena such as stress, accent, tone, meter and intonation, and the various ways they may manifest and interact with each other. Crosslinguistic work on prosody is critical because prosody in fieldwork is underdocumented. Different languages use these components to produce very distinct types of often mixed systems that shed light on the organization of spoken language and the grammar. The course will consist of readings of primary materials, it will include assignments, some data collection and learning measurement techniques to test ideas and theories, with a final project on an aspect of the prosody of a language. The first 1/3 of the course will concern the Prosodic Hierarchy: what it is, what the hierarchical levels represent, how they are manifested, and the theories use to represent and investigate them. The rest of the seminar will consist of articles and readings on topics related to the study of a variety of prosodic phenomena, including mixed systems and interactions of tone w meter, and tone and accent systems and the identification of boundaries in inflectional systems. We will discuss ideas on how to collect prosodic data with and without using elicitation materials.
|
|
LING 590-01
Aaron White
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
No description
|
|
LING 590-02
–
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
No description
|
|
LING 590-03
–
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
No description
|
|
LING 590-04
Maya Abtahian
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
No description
|
|
LING 590-05
Joanna Pietraszko
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
No description
|
|
LING 590-06
Jeremy Coburn
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
No description
|
|
LING 591-1
Jeffrey Runner
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course is for PhD students that have made arrangements with a faculty member to complete readings and discussion in a particular subject in their field of study.
|
|
LING 591-2
Nadine Grimm
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course is for PhD students that have made arrangements with a faculty member to complete readings and discussion in a particular subject in their field of study.
|
|
LING 595-1
Aaron White
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides PhD students with fewer than 90 credits the opportunity to conduct, develop, and refine their doctoral research projects. Students will engage in research relevant to their field of study and make progress toward completing their dissertations.
|
|
LING 595-2
Scott Grimm
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides PhD students with fewer than 90 credits the opportunity to conduct, develop, and refine their doctoral research projects. Students will engage in research relevant to their field of study and make progress toward completing their dissertations.
|
|
LING 595-3
Ash Asudeh
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides PhD students with fewer than 90 credits the opportunity to conduct, develop, and refine their doctoral research projects. Students will engage in research relevant to their field of study and make progress toward completing their dissertations.
|
|
LING 595-4
Nadine Grimm
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides PhD students with fewer than 90 credits the opportunity to conduct, develop, and refine their doctoral research projects. Students will engage in research relevant to their field of study and make progress toward completing their dissertations.
|
|
LING 595-5
Maya Abtahian
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides PhD students with fewer than 90 credits the opportunity to conduct, develop, and refine their doctoral research projects. Students will engage in research relevant to their field of study and make progress toward completing their dissertations.
|
|
LING 895-1
–
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course is designed for master's degree students who have completed all required coursework but still need to finalize specific degree requirements under less than half-time enrollment.
|
|
LING 897-1
Maya Abtahian
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
Blank Description
|
|
LING 999-1
Maya Abtahian
7:00PM - 7:00PM
|
|
This course provides PhD students who have completed or are currently completing 90 credits of coursework and have fulfilled all degree requirements (except for the dissertation) with the opportunity to work full-time on their dissertation. Students will make significant progress toward completing their degrees.
|
Fall 2025
| Number | Title | Instructor | Time |
|---|---|
| Monday | |
| Monday and Wednesday | |
|
LING 410-01
Ur Staff
|
|
|
The goal of this course is to provide a background for understanding the principles that underlie the structure of sound systems in human languages. Starting with the notion phoneme, the course focuses on acoustic and articulatory phonetics, as a basis for understanding phonological processes and change in linguistic sound forms. Students will acquire skills in the production, recognition, and transcription of sounds in various languages of the world. The course will serve as a foundation for work in language documentation, sociolinguistics and sociophonetics, morphology. |
|
|
LING 482-01
C.M. Downey
|
|
|
This course covers advanced topics in computational linguistics, with a focus on the deployment of deep learning methods for advancing linguistic theory as well as the use of linguistic theory for designing deep learning models. Topics include phonotactic, morphological, and syntactic grammar induction as well as morphological, syntactic and semantic parsing. |
|
|
LING 414-01
Aaron White
|
|
|
This course provides an introduction to probability and statistics for linguistics, serving as an essential foundation for linguistics students who aim to analyze experimental and corpus linguistic data. Topics include (i) elementary probability theory; (ii) elementary descriptive and inferential statistics; (iii) elementary machine learning concepts; and (iv) fixed and mixed effects models. Concepts are explored through聽linguistic case studies, including the analysis of formally collected judgment data, reaction times, and acoustic measurements. |
|
|
LING 527-01
Joyce McDonough
|
|
|
The goal of LING 527 is to acquire a basic understanding of fundamental components of the architecture of spoken language characterized as the prosodic hierarchy. the interaction of related suprasegmental phenomena such as stress, accent, tone, meter and intonation, and the various ways they may manifest and interact with each other. Crosslinguistic work on prosody is critical because prosody in fieldwork is underdocumented. Different languages use these components to produce very distinct types of often mixed systems that shed light on the organization of spoken language and the grammar. The course will consist of readings of primary materials, it will include assignments, some data collection and learning measurement techniques to test ideas and theories, with a final project on an aspect of the prosody of a language. The first 1/3 of the course will concern the Prosodic Hierarchy: what it is, what the hierarchical levels represent, how they are manifested, and the theories use to represent and investigate them. The rest of the seminar will consist of articles and readings on topics related to the study of a variety of prosodic phenomena, including mixed systems and interactions of tone w meter, and tone and accent systems and the identification of boundaries in inflectional systems. We will discuss ideas on how to collect prosodic data with and without using elicitation materials. |
|
|
LING 460-01
Joanna Pietraszko
|
|
|
This course picks up where LING 420 leaves off, though focusing more on topics in natural language syntax from a cross-linguistic perspective. The goal of the course is an approach to syntax that accounts for both language-particular as well as universal constraints on language. Among the topics studied are head and phrase movement, constraints on co-reference (anaphora), ellipsis, and agreement (phi features). |
|
| Tuesday | |
| Tuesday and Thursday | |
|
LING 425-01
Scott Grimm
|
|
|
This course introduces students to the basics of the analysis of meaning in natural language. The first section focuses on devices that motivate certain forms to take on the meanings they have. The second section of the course moves on to discuss how meanings combine to form meanings for larger unitshow words and phrases combine to form sentences meanings. Using logical notation we illustrate the formal analysis of natural language meaning in terms of truth-conditions. We will discuss the basics of set theory, and investigate how meanings represented in these terms correlate with the syntactic and lexical structures of sentences of natural language. Students of graduate standing or those with strong formal backgrounds may consider starting with LIN 265/465 instead, for which this course is ordinarily a prerequisite. |
|
|
LING 445-1
Jens Kipper
|
|
|
The goal of the course is to examine a number of central philosophical problems about language (including the nature of linguistic meaning and its relation to truth, reference, communication, and necessity), while exploring the connections between these problems and issues in and about philosophy more generally. |
|
|
LING 470-1
Nadine Grimm
|
|
|
This class is addressed to anyone interested in fieldwork involving data collection of spoken language, including for instance linguists, anthropologists, or historians. Languages and cultures are currently disappearing on an unprecedented level due to the effects of globalization and displacement of people. Minority groups are often the most affected. As languages and cultures die, we lose entire knowledge systems and communities an integral part of their identity. This class introduces you to major techniques and tools of collecting and curating language data, using it for your research purposes, and making it useful to speech communities and other scholars. We will investigate the importance of language as a social convention from an interdisciplinary perspective, including, e.g., issues in intercultural research and ethics in fieldwork. Students will design their own projects, depending on their personal interests, and receive hands-on training in audio and video recording, time-aligned annotations, data management, and archiving. |
|
|
LING 406-1
Sarah Higley
|
|
|
English is a banquet of words. And language is political. How do changes in English represent and affect culture? Inflicted by invasions and adaptations it remained English. Brought to Britain by Germanic tribes in the 5th century, it was matured by violent and peaceful contact with other peoples and ideas. Few other languages are so accepting of neologism, so humongous in vocabulary, so malleable of construction. We鈥檒l peruse texts from Old, Middle and Modern English and watch it grow from a Teutonic tongue to the powerful, ductile, and eclectic instrument it is today, spreading to other continents, colonizing and absorbing. We鈥檒l peruse linguistic Angst and jouissance by King Alfred, Aelfric, Robert of Gloucester, Chaucer, Caxton, Mulcaster, Shakespeare, Swift, Johnson, Webster, Orwell and others who praise or blame our shifty English, or who MANIPULATE it?. We鈥檒l grok urban dialects, vernaculars, slang, texting, gender. Is it 鈥渂ased on鈥 or 鈥渂ased off of鈥? 鈥渓ie鈥 or 鈥渓ay鈥? What鈥檚 the deal with register? Vernacular vs. high-falutin鈥 鈥渁cademic鈥 English? Are you down with this? Grads welcome! |
|
|
LING 426-01
Mary Moroney
|
|
|
The course examines the structure and definition of the linguistic unit 'word'' its typology and the relationship of the morphological component to other levels in the grammar. The course includes an introduction to analytical techniques with emphasis placed on an examination of data from a range of languages. The building blocks of words will be analyzed and topics such as affixation, reduplication and inflectional and derivational morphology will be covered. We will examine the properties of words and how they fit into the larger structure of linguistic knowledge, including the relationship between words and syntactic structure (ex., phrases and sentences) and the relationship between words and phonological structure (ex., phonological rules and prosodic structure). |
|
|
LING 415-1
Nadine Grimm
|
|
|
About 2,000 of the world鈥檚 7,000 languages are spoken in Africa. The diversity that characterizes these languages is exceptional, but little known to non-specialists. In this course, we will learn about the languages of Africa: the diversity of their linguistic structures (including famous features that are found nowhere else, e.g. click consonants), their history and the history of their speakers (from ca 10,000 BP to the (post-) colonial period), and their cultural contexts, among other topics. We will explore the wealth and diversity of African cultures through the lens of language. This course also incorporates a variety of other disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, history, archaeology, human genetics, as well as the arts, to bring to light the variety of institutions, norms, and social practices produced by African societies which have historically been excluded from dominant cultural narratives. The focus will be on the role played by language in these institutions, norms and practices, and their representation. This course has no prerequisites and is open to anyone with an interest in African languages or the African continent.
|
|
|
LING 440-01
Maya Abtahian
|
|
|
This course offers an overview of the study of language variation and change. We will examine some of the ways that spoken language varies according to the social characteristics and social motivations of its speakers. Methods for quantitative analysis of linguistic variation will be introduced. |
|
| Wednesday | |
| Thursday | |
| Friday | |