Linguistics (LING)

This course is designed to provide students with a general introduction to the scientific study of language. Our main goals include familiarizing you with linguistic terminology, teaching both the methods of linguistic analysis and how to apply them (to English and to other languages, including languages that you might know, and languages that you don’t know). We also discuss theories and research on how both first and other languages are learned by children and adults, and encourage students to think about the social implications of language use. In the first part of the course students will learn about the physical and mental aspects of sounds, or speech production. We then discuss how knowledge about the sound patterns of language can be applied in context, by learning about accents, dialects, and other types of patterned variation in language. This can involve topics as varied as how English is spoken on the East and West coasts of the U.S., or in Britain vs. America, how ethnicity shapes and is shaped by language variation, gender-based patterns of variation, and stylistic variation, for example, what President Obama’s different speech styles reveals about the way he wants to be seen by different social groups. After this discussion of sounds, we move on to an examination of the linguistic structure of words and sentences, building towards the ability to extract regularities from linguistic data in unfamiliar languages. We discuss how this can be applied by learning about how language is acquired and processed by children and adults. This can involve topics like age and individual differences in cognition, for example, in working memory, as well as the study of how sentences might be processed in the brain. In the last part of the course we focus on understanding the ways people use and interpret language in different contexts. With understanding “meaning” as a foundation, we move on to exploring a variety of issues in language and culture, including language and humor and social rules of politeness. If you are majoring or minoring in linguistics, this course will provide you with the background you need to succeed in other linguistics courses. If you are studying a foreign language, this course will provide you with additional tools to facilitate the learning process. Linguistics, which is the scientific study of language, interfaces with a wide variety of other fields (e.g., anthropology, sociology, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, politics and the law, and public policy), so you should be able to make exciting connections whatever your background and interests. This course also fulfills the social science requirement for undergraduates.

In this course, we’ll explore two fundamental questions about human language: 1. What do different languages sound like? 2. What does a speaker of a language know about what his or her own language sounds like? These questions are the central questions of phonetics and phonology, the two sub-disciplines of linguistics which most relate to pronunciation. Phonetics is primarily concerned with the physical properties of speech, and so with determining • What parts of the mouth are involved in the production of different sounds? • How must these parts be moved in order to produce a given speech sound? • What are the acoustic properties of speech sounds? We’ll be examining these questions in the first part of the course. You’ll gain an abstract knowledge of how different sounds are produced, but also practical skill in producing them yourself. Phonology is primarily concerned with the mental processes by which speakers manipulate and organize speech sounds, and so addresses questions like • Why are different languages based on different sets of sounds? • What sound combinations are permitted in any given language? o And why are some sound combinations more common than others? • How and why does the pronunciation of a word change because of its context? o Are why are some sound changes more common than others? We’ll be examining these questions in the second part of the course. Here, you’ll gain a solid foundation in extracting the key mental generalizations that underlie the phonetic data of a language. Course Goals • Practical faculty in producing the sounds of the world’s languages, and an intellectual understanding of how they are produced • Understanding of the acoustic properties of speech sounds, and ability to analyze speech sounds using (freely available) software • Understanding of the unconscious knowledge that speakers possess of how their native languages are pronounced • Ability to extract phonological generalizations from phonetic data

Calling all word nerds! Ever wonder what's going on in your brain when you're three turns into a Wordle and utterly confounded? Have you had an aha moment when you realized the crossword clue you thought was a noun is actually a verb? In Wordplay, we'll explore what word games reveal about the structure of language and how linguistic theory informs your approach to solving - whether you know it or not. We’ll also consider the applications of wordplay (educational and therapeutic) as well as the sociolinguistic aspects of puzzles (e.g., who decides that a word or a phrase is legit?). Let the games begin!

In this class you will learn how to discover the hidden rules and patterns inside sentences of English and other languages. Linguists do this by analyzing sentences that speakers find acceptable (“The cat is hungry”) and also sentences that they do not find acceptable (“Hungry cat the is”). Using a standard theoretical framework in linguistics called Generative Grammar, we will analyze the structure of words and sentences, formulate hypotheses about how sentences are formed in a language, make predictions about the types of sentences a speaker of that language would or would not find acceptable, and test these hypotheses against new linguistic data. Through the course, you will gain knowledge about the structure of words, phrases, and sentences, and about the similarities and differences between languages. You will also gain significant experience with tools and methodology employed by professional linguists working in a variety of fields, including academic research, natural language processing, and conversational AI (e.g., Siri, Chat GPT). Coursework will include weekly homework assignments, a midterm, and a final.

In this course, we will investigate how language shapes and is shaped by society. We will range over many levels of social organization (from nation to neighborhood to individual) as well as many levels of language organization (from pronunciations to conversations to entire languages). We will also consider how sociolinguistic knowledge can be applied to areas such as language policy and planning (including issues pertaining to societal bi- and multilingualism and language endangerment), languages and dialects in education (e.g. the use of students’ home dialects in the classroom), and language and the law (e.g. conducting forensic linguistic analysis of language evidence such as ransom notes, threatening emails and text messages). Students will gain firsthand experience in conducting sociolinguistic analysis of real-world data.

This course will introduce students to the basics of Natural Language Processing (NLP), a field that combines linguistics and computer science to produce applications, such as generative AI, that are profoundly impacting our society. We will cover a range of topics that form the basis of these exciting technological advances and will provide students with a platform for future study and research in this area. We will learn to implement simple representations such as finite-state techniques, n-gram models, and topic models in the Python programming language. Previous knowledge of Python is not required, but students should be prepared to invest the necessary time and effort to become proficient over the semester. Students who take this course will gain a thorough understanding of the fundamental methods used in natural language understanding, along with an ability to assess the strengths and weaknesses of natural language technologies based on these methods.

This course will introduce you to central questions, theories, debates, and research findings in the area of second language learning and teaching, a field that is concerned with the central questions: How are second languages learned and how might they best be taught? We will address this and many other questions central to this quickly growing field such as: - Is it possible to attain ‘native-like’ proficiency if you start learning a language after childhood? - What does it mean to be ‘bilingual’? Do you have to speak both languages equally well? - How might language learning occur most effectively after childhood? - What roles do conversational interaction and receiving feedback play in second-language development? - How do individual differences such as intelligence, aptitude, and motivation affect L2 development? Are some people just better than others at second language learning? - Are there differences in how languages may best be learned across different contexts (e.g., naturalistic exposure vs. classroom instruction vs. study abroad)? What about through different teaching methods? - What is the role of technology in second language learning? Can we learn languages just as well online as we do face-to-face? - What are the cognitive benefits of knowing more than one language? Can knowing another language affect the way you think? We will accomplish this by critically evaluating foundational and current work in these areas, as well as considering how theories and research findings can inform current educational policies and practice. The class will be interactive, with a combination of asynchronous video lectures, podcasts, discussion boards, and synchronous small-group and whole-class discussions. The course is designed for any students (for example, linguistics, education, world languages, psychology, anthropology etc.) interested in deepening their understanding of second language learning scholarship and developing the ability to be a critical consumer of research. Note: this class is available at both the undergraduate (251) and graduate (553) level. The course levels will differ in terms of the depth required of assignments and the final paper.

This course is an undergraduate class which focuses on a central problem in human culture which is the fast disappearance of the majority of the world’s languages. When languages die, the cultures, social structures, and unique windows on the human mind, die as well. There is an urgency to document and revitalize the many languages that are getting endangered and at the verge of extinction. Since the grim prediction about the extinction of half of the ~6000 languages by the end of this [twenty-first] century (Krauss, 1992:6), many linguists and anthropologists have been working on fast-tracking the documentation and revitalization effort of endangered languages. This class will examine the extent of language endangerment across the world, general and specific causes of language endangerment (per region) and processes that are helping, and/or will help with revitalization and documentary efforts. Students will also be exposed to the tools, methodologies and equipment that are available for language revitalization and documentation. Enrolled students will be required to actively participate in the class. There will be two quizzes, and a proposal for language documentation or revitalization which will involve students identifying an endangered language and developing plans that will support the revitalization or documentation of the language.

From Asp to Zed: Decoding the World's Writing Systems

Pragmatics studies the interface between the grammatical/cognitive linguistic system and the social/communicative functions of language in society. Though a combination of readings, hands-on projects, and cross-linguistic investigation, in this course students will learn about how we use words to: perform actions (the theory of speech acts), imply more than what than we say (implicature), build specific meanings by drawing on contextual information (indexicality), link to an established background of assumptions (presupposition), maintain relationships (politeness), and establish social roles (honorificity). Prerequisite: Any course in Linguistics or permission of instructor.

Participants in this course will explore how language diversity, particularly diversity related to today’s multilingualism, contributes to marginalization that puts people’s rights and well-being in jeopardy across the following domains: access to employment, quality of schooling, treatment by the legal system, right to health, and participation in public life. A sustained focus will be on the language diversity of immigrant groups and indigenous peoples, who are often involved in processes of learning and unlearning multiple languages across their life span, and whose “different” language repertoires intersect with ethnicity, race, gender, socioeconomic class, and other markers of identity to create deep vulnerabilities and to compound injustices. We will study both ideological and micro-interactional processes by which language is implicated in socially unjust practices across key realms of life, and particularly in the context of transnational mobility. The course seeks to help students (a) build capacity for understanding, confronting, and disrupting language-related injustice and (b) develop personal strategies for affirming human language rights and becoming informed advocates of language diversity and multilingualism.

Have you studied abroad and want to process and share your experiences? Are you considering studying abroad, but would like to know more about languages, cultures and expectations? Are you wondering how you can build on a study abroad experience for your future career? This new course offered in the Department of linguistics will allow students to explore these questions while deepening their understanding of the connections between study abroad, and learning about foreign languages and cultures: • Foundations of Study Abroad o When did students begin to study abroad and why? History, background and context of study abroad. What factors are helpful to consider when choosing/reflecting on a study abroad experience? • Study Abroad for Language Learning o Expectations and reality of language learning outcomes. How to get the most out of linguistic opportunities and interactions abroad. • Cross-Cultural Communication in Study Abroad Contexts o Cross-cultural differences and problems that can arise, how to recognize and address issues including encountering new dialects (British English, for example), and how language, gender, power and politics can interact during a study abroad. o Issues of bicultural understanding, acquisition and development • Educational implications o Using study abroad to collect data (interviews, photos, archival work) for a senior thesis or final paper. Short-term summer program to and preparation for full semesters abroad. Setting realistic but ambitious goals for language and culture learning. o How to use a study abroad experience for your career preparation, for graduate programs, or to find research opportunities. o Discussion of the implications of study abroad for the Georgetown community and beyond."

Talk about health surrounds us. We can’t open a newspaper without seeing some reference to the national health care debate, stem cell research, and the effects of second-hand smoke. Reports of bioterrorism and global health scares such as H1N1 flood the airwaves. In visits with our doctors, we talk our way towards diagnoses that help us understand why we haven’t been feeling well and then weigh the pros and cons of different treatment options. My entire life in linguistics has been spent exploring interrelationships between language and a variety of such health issues and contexts, large and small. I’m interested in how the voices of scientists, health care providers, politicians, attorneys, journalists and patients enter into conversations with each other. My passion for understanding the mutual effects between language and human health – how language use affects health as well as how health affects language - has encouraged me to reach across disciplines, both to the scholarly literature and to practitioners. In this course, we’ll draw on a variety of primary sources in our interdisciplinary examination of health communication in public and in private. We’ll view videotapes of physician-patient visits, analyze transcripts of genetic counseling sessions, read widely within the print media, listen to congressional hearings, examine direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising and public health campaigns, and engage with guest speakers from the National Institutes of Health, Georgetown University Medical Center, Johns Hopkins University, the American College of Medical Genetics, and the Washington Post. This course is designed to appeal especially to students with career aspirations in the following fields: medicine, linguistics, public policy, bioethics, government, and journalism. Specific topics will be selected based on participants’ areas of interest. Prerequisites: none Credits: 3 Selected Texts Ainsworth-Vaughn, Nancy. 1998. Claiming Power in Doctor-Patient Talk. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Capps, Lisa and Ochs, Elinor. 1995. Constructing Panic: The Discourse of Agoraphobia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gwyn, Richard. 2002. Communicating Health and Illness. London: Sage. Heritage, John and Maynard, Douglas W. 2006. Communication in Medical Care: Interaction between Primary Care Phsyicians and Patients. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Other readings on Blackboard Requirements Active participation in class discussions Personal and professional vision essays Book review Occasional small assignments Two group projects with class presentations and papers at mid-term and final

This course examines the complex interplay between language and education from a wide range of sociolinguistic approaches, including pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography, anthropological linguistics, conversation analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, and multimodal discourse analysis. We will consider how educational norms and values are enacted through language use in classroom interactions, instructional activities and materials, curricula, assessments, and policies. In addition to theoretical and topical readings and class discussions, students will take part in hands-on data analysis workshops and discussion leading tasks on topics related to the course. The course will culminate in a final research project, in which students will further research a topic of their choice related to the course and present their findings in a formal paper and presentation.

This course explores the nature of cross-cultural communication from the perspective of interactional sociolinguistics. We take a broad view of “culture”, which includes geographic region, ethnicity, age, socioeconomic class, gender, and sexuality. We examine the relationship between language and culture by investigating aspects of language use that vary by culture, including turn-taking, specific speech acts, silence, politeness, and nonverbal cues. In addition to considering language use in everyday conversation, we examine communication in digital media, including emails and social media sites, and in institutional contexts, including education, business, law, and medicine. Class activities include discussion in whole-class and small-group formats, lectures, video presentations, and hands-on data analysis. Requirements include a solid attendance record, active participation in class discussions, reflections on/responses to readings, field notes (in which students apply course content to short analyses of interactions outside the classroom), and short papers analyzing recordings of naturally occurring discourse collected by students. There are no prerequisites; no prior background in linguistics is required or expected. The course is designed for undergraduate students from all majors and schools.

In this course, we explore the complex relationships between language, gender, and sexuality, integrating theory and analytical perspectives from sociolinguistics and gender theory. Through readings, lectures, full-class and small group discussion, and hands-on data workshops, we will cover topics such as: gender as socially constructed through language use; gender differences in language use and interaction (e.g., turn-taking and interrupting in conversation, gossip, humor, narrative, conflict); sexism and heterosexism in language; sexual orientation and language; representations of gender and gendered language use in the media; and language and gender in institutional contexts (school, family, work, law). Students also carry out original research on a topic of their choice, culminating in a final paper and class presentation.

Food and language are omnipresent in everyday life. We use language to talk about food, and food terms have rich cultural histories. Menus and food packaging labels provide windows into not only an item’s nature and quality, but also the desired customer’s identity. People talk while they cook, and while they eat; in fact, mealtime has long been a privileged site for the study of language in use, especially in families. Parents use language to socialize their children into food preferences; even among adults, the taste of food is collaboratively negotiated in interaction (as can be witnessed at a wine or chocolate tasting). People participate in online forums on topics such as gourmet cooking, veganism, and weight loss; they use language about food to portray themselves as certain kinds of people (gourmand or glutton, decadent or disciplined eater). People post brunch photos on Instagram, recipe videos on Facebook, and restaurant reviews on Yelp. Food is a necessity and a luxury; it is intertwined with identities (e.g., cultural, gendered, socioeconomic), relationships (e.g., parent-child, friend-friend), and values (e.g., healthy eating, ethical eating), all of which are negotiated through language. In this course, we will explore intersections between language and food by reading research stemming from a range of language-focused perspectives and academic disciplines. We will apply theoretical concepts to various data types, including restaurant menus, recipes, mealtime talk among friends and family, food-related online discussion forums, social media posts about food, food advertisements, and reality TV shows about food. We will learn about the multifaceted and sometimes surprising connections between language and food, while also gaining insights into the role of language in creating and negotiating social structures, processes, and ideologies that go well beyond food. A central component of this course is a series of small-scale research projects, in which students will apply course concepts to empirical data that they collect.

Why is human language the way that it is? This course will examine how human language is shaped by “nature” (the biological and genetic characteristics of human beings) as well as by “nurture” (the cultural and social contexts in which humans develop, learn, and use language). We will examine the linguistic structure of natural languages, both spoken and signed, to identify the ways in which languages differ from one another—and the ways in which they do not. To understand how language came to be this way, we will ask which aspects of this (in)variability are present in the rudimentary communication systems developed by Deaf children who grow up without exposure to a natural signed language; in new or emerging human languages (e.g., Nicaraguan Sign Language, Amami Island Sign Language); and in animal communication systems. We will also examine how the process of cultural transmission influences language structure, using evidence from the development of real languages and also from psychological experiments on language evolution in the lab. A major component of the course is our “Grow a Language” project, in which students construct an artificial language and study how the language changes as it is transmitted from one “generation” of learners to the next (a replication of a famous psychological experiment). Through the course, students will gain insight into the deep similarities across languages (including signed languages); the ability to identify and interpret scientific evidence relevant to the nature/nurture question in human cognition; and hands-on experience conducting an experiment in psycholinguistics.

Parallel and multilingual corpora are collections of natural language data in several languages, constructed using principled design criteria, which contain either aligned translations of the same texts, or distinct but comparable texts. As such, they are vital resources for comparative linguistics, translation studies, multilingual lexicography and machine translation. This course sets out to explore the theoretical problems raised by translated language, as well as practical issues and empirical patterns found in multilingual data. This includes questions such as exploring similarities and differences between closely related languages, such as different Romance or Slavic languages, or very distant ones, such as English and Japanese. The focus of the course is on the study of actual examples of parallel and comparable corpora using computational methods. Students will have access to search engines indexing aligned translations and will learn some of the basics of building a parallel corpus. The course introduces some fundamental computational methodology, but does not have a programming requirement.

This is an introductory course on language and the brain, designed for students with no background in neuroscience. Its goal is to introduce students to the major scientific findings in this area as well as the scientific process that generated this evidence. Topics include the brain regions and networks involved in language processing in the healthy brain; how these structures develop in children; and how language skills are affected by damage to these structures.

Have you ever wondered how you can apply your linguistics major or minor in a job or a career outside of academia? This class will introduce you to the wide range of jobs and internships that make use of your linguistic skill set. We’ll explore potential career paths in business, government, nonprofit, and tech organizations. You’ll learn a career management method that you will use for life. You’ll work on developing and tailoring an effective resume; creating a cover letter template; optimizing your professional digital presence on LinkedIn and personal brand websites, and curating narratives of achievement to use in networking and interview contexts. At the end of this course, you will have identified your skills, abilities, interests, and values and will know how and where to find job opportunities that may be a good fit. You will have a professional portfolio that can be tailored to different job announcements and you will have practiced presentation skills and a mock interview. We will also explore whether a graduate degree–in linguistics or another discipline–is worth the time and money for the kind of career you want to pursue.

We can learn a lot about human language by thinking about the artificial languages that people construct for imaginative purposes. In this course, we will learn about the grammatical diversity of human languages and how conlangs in some ways reflect, and in some ways do not reflect, that diversity. We will also discuss common ideologies of the relationship between language and society, and how those ideologies are represented in the conlangs of fiction and movies. Over the course of the semester, students will invent their own conlang and fictional society that speaks it.

This course will explore both the unity and diversity of the world’s languages through morphology (i.e. the study of how words are formed). Taking the perspective of scientists encountering an unfamiliar language for the first time, we will learn to morphologically analyze foreign language data, uncover linguistic patterns, and understand the grammatical relationships that can be encoded cross-linguistically. With this knowledge of word structure as a foundation, we will further investigate how morphological patterns might be explained through linguistic theory and psychology.

This course begins with a three-week introduction to formal tools used in semantics and pragmatics (set theory, basic logic, functions). Then, the bulk of the semester is spend on reading and discussion of original papers and overview articles covering a representative range of contemporary research in these areas. We may work with readings on the following topics, as well as others based on class preferences: argument structure, predicates, adjectives, definiteness, quantification, tense, aspect, modality, negation, conjunction, presupposition, implicature, topic and focus, information structure, discourse particles. The goal of the course is to give students a practical understanding of the nature of linguistic meaning, an ability to read in semantics/pragmatics, and a foundation for advanced courses in these areas.

This course is designed to help learners of the oral, reading, listening, speaking and writing skills of Akan (Twi). Learners will be introduced to vocabulary items and grammar of the language. The goal is to introduce learners to Akan language and culture. Learners will have the opportunity to participate in practical oral expression, description and interpersonal interactions. Beginners will also be able to recognize Akan words and use them in appropriate beginners conversations.

The course covers quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods linguistics research and will teach you how to: * Identify research problems, areas and questions * Prepare IRB applications and informed consent documents (and address IRB queries) * Address ethical concerns involved in conducting research with human participants * Come up with predictions * Decide on appropriate and feasible methods for answering research questions or addressing areas of research interest * Choose, design, and/or adapt data collection techniques, and pilot-test them * Understand validity and reliability in quantitative research * Define and operationalize variables * Understand the importance of credibility, transferability and dependability in qualitative research, together with triangulation * Collect, transcribe, describe, code, and analyze data * Understand how mixed-methods research works, layering different perspectives * Use a variety of qual-quant tools for data coding and analysis (e.g., SuperLab, NVivo) * Analyze and critique research designs in the published literature * Write up and present research reports (focus on conference presentations, paper submissions)

Everything that happens related to health and health care involves language, and dialogues between healthcare providers and patients form the basis of what we know and believe about diagnosis, illness, treatment, and recovery. The Health Dialogues Research Group—a designated CAS CURE (Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience) class—is a unique opportunity for undergraduates to gain hands-on experience conducting original interaction research through a sociolinguistic lens. Working with a corpus of interactions between healthcare providers and patients, we will explore questions like the following, as well as others that students develop: - What metaphors do doctors use to explain treatments? what metaphors do patients use to describe pain? - How do patients tell narratives of illness? of diagnosis? - How do doctors communicate risk? The class will involve instruction on conducting linguistic research and developing research questions, support for managing a collaborative research project, training on qualitative data analysis software, and "research team meetings": opportunities to practice sharing problems and proposing solutions to colleagues. Students will gain experience that mirrors how research is done in think tanks, nonprofit social science research organizations, and industry. Students will also have opportunities to present their findings to the Georgetown community and to industry professionals. Participation in the Health Dialogues Research Group is useful for linguistics majors, as well as medical humanities students, psychologists/anthropologists/sociologists, human science majors, pre-med students, and anyone interested in how language and interaction work in healthcare contexts.

Human language technologies increasingly help us to communicate with computers and with each other. But every human language is extraordinarily complex, and the diversity seen in languages of the world is massive. Natural language processing (NLP) seeks to formalize and unpack different aspects of a language so computers can approximate human-like language abilities. In this course, we will examine the building blocks that underlie a human language such as English (or Japanese, Arabic, Tamil, or Navajo), and fundamental algorithms for analyzing those building blocks in text data, with an emphasis on the structure and meaning of words and sentences. Students will implement a variety of core algorithms for both rule-based and machine learning methods, and learn how to use computational linguistic datasets such as lexicons and treebanks. Text processing applications such as machine translation, information retrieval, and dialogue systems will be introduced as well. This course is designed for undergraduates who are comfortable with the basics of discrete probability and possess solid programming skills, including the ability to use basic data structures and familiarity with regular expressions. COSC-160: Data Structures is the prerequisite for CS students, and LING-001 is the prerequisite for Linguistics students. Students that are new to programming or need a refresher are directed to LING-362: Introduction to NLP. The languages of instruction will be English and Python

Through hands-on research experience and class discussions and reflections, this course introduces students to how linguistic research is conducted. Students gain experience carrying out linguistic research as part of a research team (along with their linguistics graduate student mentor). Examples of research assignments may involve tasks such as data collection, data transcription, data coding and annotation, data analysis, inter-rater reliability, data digitization, statistical analysis, theoretical analysis, and occasionally, literature searches and reviews. Additionally, students are encouraged to think critically about the research process, including developing a research question, designing a study or experiment, considering ethical issues in research, systematically working with data, and analyzing the results and their implications. The overall goal of this course is for students to become more familiar with the scholarly research process, gaining important practical skills necessary to carry out their own independent research projects in the future.

The experiences of each student in the course will differ based on the research project that they sign up to do at the beginning of the course. Students will have a choice of projects based on their interests. Class meetings will provide opportunities to discuss challenges and opportunities in the research process and working on a research team.

This course introduces central concepts of and tools to be used in second/foreign language testing. The course explores issues of ethics, the theoretical foundations of language assessment including reliability, validity arguments, impact and washback, as well as the technical and practical aspects of developing language tests for different uses and purposes. Students will apply concepts via hands-on course projects, which will involve reviewing an existing language test, discussing a current issue in language testing, developing and critiquing items and completing a final project in test design. Active participation in discussing the readings and relating them to language acquisition, policy and sociolinguistics is critical to the course. Students will also relate current events to the concepts discussed. Structured in a lecture/discussion format. Learning Goals: To become familiar with current language testing theory and practice; To understand the multi-faceted, iterative, and overlapping process of assessment; To develop skills in writing, revising, and analyzing results of classroom tests; To review and critique existing assessment instruments; To understand how to select tests for particular purposes and situations; To evaluate research in which language testing plays a part; To develop a test framework.

This course surveys principles and practices for second and foreign language teaching, drawing from current research and theory. It addresses students who want to teach or tutor language learners, on a professional or volunteer basis, in the United States or abroad. Through readings, discussions, activities, and projects (e.g., classroom observation, lesson planning, teaching demonstration), you will learn to make informed choices in current and future instructional settings. Topics covered include (1) teaching techniques for addressing the following “what’s” of language teaching: listening, speaking, pronunciation, reading, writing, grammar, vocabulary, pragmatics, culture, and interaction; (2) cultural and sociopolitical issues of language teaching; (3) lesson planning, needs analysis, and syllabus and curriculum design; (4) the history of language teaching methodologies; and (5) the role of classroom assessment, program evaluation, and technology in language teaching and learning. Students are expected to critically draw on their experiences as language learners and reflect on their own experiences and/or assumptions about language teaching practices.

This course examines the complex and multifaceted interplay between language and the political sphere. Taking a broad sociolinguistic approach that incorporates theoretical frameworks such as pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography, Critical Discourse Analysis, and multimodal discourse analysis, students consider the relationship between language and politics from three major perspectives. First, we investigate language use in various genres of political discourse, including speeches, debates, advertising, and print and broadcast media coverage of political events, focusing on how various linguistic features serve to shape political identities and stances. Next, we consider the discursive construction and negotiation of various policy issues (e.g., education, health, immigration), focusing on how these issues are framed by different political parties and stakeholders with divergent interests and ideologies. Finally, we take on the notion of language as a political issue itself, examining topics such as standard and official language movements, the status of language in the construction of national identity, and the role of language planning initiatives in addressing the shifting linguistic ecology of a globalizing world. The course assumes basic familiarity with sociolinguistic principles and works toward refining students’ critical and analytical abilities in the study of language in its social context. In addition to theoretical and topical readings, lectures, and class discussions, students take part in hands-on data analysis workshops and group presentations. The course culminates in a final empirical research project, in which students pursue a topic of their choice related to the course in further depth. Findings will be presented in a formal paper and presentation. Prerequisite: LING 001 (Introduction to Language) or prior coursework in sociolinguistics.

This course will introduce students to the basics of Natural Language Processing (NLP), a field that combines linguistics and computer science to produce applications, such as generative AI, that are profoundly impacting our society. We will cover a range of topics that form the basis of these exciting technological advances and will provide students with a platform for future study and research in this area. We will learn to implement simple representations such as finite-state techniques, n-gram models, and topic models in the Python programming language. Previous knowledge of Python is not required, but students should be prepared to invest the necessary time and effort to become proficient over the semester. Students who take this course will gain a thorough understanding of the fundamental methods used in natural language understanding, along with an ability to assess the strengths and weaknesses of natural language technologies based on these methods.

This course teaches advanced topics in programming for linguistic data analysis and processing using the Python language. A series of assignments will give students hands-on practice implementing core algorithms for linguistic tasks. By the end of the course, students will be able to transform pseudocode into well-written code for algorithms that make sense of textual data, and to evaluate the algorithms quantitatively and qualitatively. Linguistic tasks will include edit distance, semantic similarity, authorship detection, and named entity recognition. Python topics will include the appropriate use of data structures; mathematical objects in numpy; exception handling; object-oriented programming; and software development practices such as code documentation and version control.

This course is a graduate class that focuses on a central problem in human culture which is the fast disappearance of the majority of the world’s languages. Undergraduate students are also welcome to enroll in the class. When languages die, the cultures, social structures, and unique windows on the human mind, either die or are expressed in a different language. There is an urgency to document and revitalize the many languages that are getting endangered and on the verge of extinction. Krauss (1992) predicted that half of the world's language would be extinct by the end of the century. Since then, many linguists and anthropologists have been working on fast-tracking the documentation and revitalization efforts of endangered languages. The documentation and revitalization efforts among others provide empirical data for testing linguistic theory. This class will examine the extent of language endangerment across the world, general and specific causes of language endangerment (per region) as well as revitalization and documentary efforts toward language sustenance. Students will also be exposed to the technological tools, methodologies, and equipment that are available for language documentation and revitalization. Some of these technologies and approaches will be demonstrated in the classroom through fieldwork activities. Enrolled students will be required to actively participate in class activities and discussions.

This course examines the complex interplay between language and education from a wide range of sociolinguistic approaches, including pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography, anthropological linguistics, conversation analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, and multimodal discourse analysis. We will consider how educational norms and values are enacted through language use in classroom interactions, instructional activities and materials, curricula, assessments, and policies. In addition to theoretical and topical readings and class discussions, students will take part in hands-on data analysis workshops and discussion leading tasks on topics related to the course. The course will culminate in a final research project, in which students will further research a topic of their choice related to the course and present their findings in a formal paper and presentation.

Many theories of compositionality posit strict separation between the lexicon on the one hand, and abstract procedural rules for grammatical combination on the other. In contrast, Construction Grammar cohesively accounts for the forms and meanings of morphemes, words, sentence patterns, and even “fringe” phenomena such as the Caused-Motion construction: She blinked the snow off of her eyelashes. This course provides an overview of several variant approaches to Construction Grammar. The course will begin with a survey of readings representing differing Construction Grammar approaches, including work from Fillmore, Lambrecht, Michaelis, Goldberg, Croft, and Bergen. As we examine the different flavors of Construction Grammar, we will explore the validity, advantages, and disadvantages of Construction Grammar. In this exploration, you will be asked to consider and debate questions at the crux of grammar, such as: How does syntax fit into the big picture of language in general? How are generalizations over utterances represented? How are an indefinite variety of utterances producible from a finite system of grammatical knowledge? Finally, you will select and apply a construction grammar approach of your choice to a theoretical problem (e.g., how are light verb constructions extended, and what makes a novel combination acceptable or unacceptable?) or application area (e.g., language learning or multi-word expression detection) of interest to you in any language you are studying, comparing with other approaches to this problem.

Linguists have developed a large number of formally precise syntactic theories, and many of them have been important tools for computational research. In this course, we will study five such systems with the goal of understanding both their perspective on syntax and its relation to parsing, production, and semantics, and will work to gain sufficient skill in using the formal systems to make them useful for computational work. The five systems we will discuss, along with classic early references, are the following: HPSG (Head-driven Phrase-structure Grammar: Pollard and Sag 1994; Sag, Wasow, and Bender 1999) CCG (Combinatory Categorial Grammar: Steedman 2000) LFG (Lexical Functional Grammar: Kaplan and Bresnan 1982, Dalrymple 2001) TAG (Tree Adjoining Grammar (Joshi 1987) Minimalist Grammars (Stabler 2001) We will spend most of our time on HPSG (with its semantic theory Minimal Recursion Semantics, MRS) and CCG. HPSG is is both widely used in computational research and influential as a framework for studying syntax. CCG is an important modern version of the classical framework of categorial grammar and supports a direct syntax-semantics interface. We will also do brief one-week overviews of LFG and TAG, and will take a look at Minimalist Grammars because they represent a formalization of the Minimalist syntax familiar to many linguists.

This course will take on the grammatical category of prepositions, which are hands-down some of the most intriguing and beguiling words once you get to know them. (How many prepositions are there in the previous sentence? The answer may surprise you!) We will look at their syntactic and semantic versatility in English and how they vary across languages. We will explore how they denote relations in space and time, as well as many other kinds of meanings. We will see why they are so hard to learn in a second language, and why they are difficult to define in dictionaries and teach to computers. The course will be project-based, including a significant project on a language other than English.

Annotated corpora and corpus methods are increasingly being used as a source of empirical evidence in syntactic research - due in part to the availability of larger corpora and more detailed analysis possibilities. At the same time, the focus in syntactic corpora has been very strongly on canonical English, particularly newspaper language, which is used as a basis for automatic Natural Language Processing. This course aims to extend the borders of standard syntax analysis in corpora to non-standard varieties of English. We will learn two different frameworks for carrying out syntactic analysis of corpus data, also referred to as 'tree-banking'. The course will accordingly be divided into two parts, devoted to analyzing constituent trees based on the Penn Treebank guidelines and dependency trees based on the Stanford Typed Dependency guidelines respectively. In both cases, we will begin by learning the guidelines for standard English, and then apply and adapt them to a non-standard variety of data, such as dialectal English, World Englishes, non-native learner English, historical varieties, language on the Internet or disfluent spoken data.

Digital linguistic corpora, i.e. electronic collections of written, spoken or multimodal language data, have become an increasingly important source of empirical information for computational, theoretical and applied linguistics in recent years, as well as underpinning much work in Artificial Intelligence and instruction fine-tuning for Large Language Models. This course is meant as a theoretically founded, practical introduction to corpus work with a broad selection of data, including non-standardized varieties such as language on the Internet, learner corpora and spoken corpora. We will discuss issues of corpus design, annotation and evaluation using quantitative methods and both manual and automatic annotation tools for different levels of linguistic analysis, from parts-of-speech and lexicography, through aspects of syntax, semantics and discourse annotation. As part of the course, students will participate in the creation of a multilayer corpus that will be built up as the course progresses.

This course uses a hands-on, interactive approach to introduce basic design, measurement, analysis, and inference procedures used in applied linguistics quantitative research, with an emphasis on understanding and using statistics and on developing foundational skills with computerized statistical tools. More broadly, the course addresses a range of topics critical to the accurate and ethical use of quantitative methods in language studies, including: (a) the purposes and roles of research; (b) literature review and the generation of research questions; (c) study design strategies for gathering, organizing, and analyzing quantitative data; (d) the importance of accuracy (and error) in developing and using measures and other data elicitation procedures; (e) critical reading of research reports; and (f) current concerns with the use of statistical significance testing, the role to be played by power analysis, effect sizes, and confidence intervals, and the future of quantitative research in applied linguistics.

Large language models (LLMs) are the foundational technology behind today’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems. They have revolutionized the field of natural language processing and challenged traditional ideas about how language is represented in the human mind. This course offers an introduction to LLMs from the perspective of computational linguistics. Through lectures and hands-on demonstrations, we will explore three interrelated questions: How do LLMs work at a technical level? How can they be used to process natural language data? And how can they be used to model human linguistic cognition? The first half of the course will cover technical foundations of LLMs, including the transformer architecture, tokenization, interpretability techniques, and scaling. The second half of the course will focus on LLMs’ applications in natural language processing, linguistics, and cognitive science. Topics will include security and privacy, ethical issues, multilingualism, and LMs as models of human language processing and acquisition. This course is appropriate for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Students will gain experience training (small) language models, implementing basic interpretability techniques, and reading recent research papers in the area. Knowledge of programming in Python, and basic math and statistics, are required as a prerequisite.

This course will teach statistical analysis of language data with a focus on corpus materials, using the freely available statistics software ‘R’. The course will begin with foundational notions and methods for statistical evaluation, hypothesis testing and visualization of linguistic data which are necessary for both the practice and the understanding of current quantitative research. As we progress we will learn exploratory methods to chart out meaningful structures in language data, such as agglomerative clustering, principal component analysis and multifactorial regression analysis. The course assumes basic mathematical skills and familiarity with linguistic methodology, but does not require a background in statistics or R. This course fulfills the Quantitative Reasoning and Data Literacy (QRDL) requirement in the Core Curriculum.

How do things like Amazon Echo and Siri work? What kinds of linguistics went into them and how could they be made better? In order to explore these questions, this course will survey speech technology from a computational linguistic perspective. Both speech recognition, also known as speech-to-text (STT), and speech synthesis, also known as text-to-speech (TTS), will be investigated along with related technologies like speaker/dialect/accent/language identification. While communicating the basic algorithms employed by these technologies, the course will emphasize hands-on and project work to allow you to work with web-based and open source tools to build your own components, evaluate existing products and explore linguistic questions. Students from a variety of backgrounds are encouraged to take this course. Helpful background includes: natural language processing, phonetics, phonology and sociolinguistics. While not required, helpful technical background includes familiarity with speech analysis software such as PRAAT, Linux, shell scripting and coding/scripting in languages like Python, Java, C++, etc.

After more than 60 years since Machine Translation (MT) research started at Georgetown, this area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) research is more active than ever. In this course we explore the data-driven approaches to translate human language with computers that supplanted rule-based approaches in the past quarter century. First, we lay foundations for the course with statistical NLP relevant to MT and corpus preparation. Next, we start exploring statistical MT (SMT) – from word-based models to phrase-based models to tree-based models. We will then cover domain-adaptation, incremental learning and how to integrate linguistic information. We will learn how to evaluate system output with automatic and human evaluation methods. Recently, deep learning-based approaches have proven to produce superior translation quality compared to SMT. We will investigate the current state-of-the-art in neural MT (NMT) and contrast its strength and weaknesses with SMT. Machine translation does not exist in a vacuum; it is now used to provide draft translations for human translators and is embedded in other NLP systems. With better quality, raw MT is increasingly used in in written and spoken human communication. We study the adaptation of MT for the most common applications

AI, Language, and Interaction examines how intelligent systems learn, represent, and use language, with a focus on the technical foundations of chatbots, task-oriented dialogue systems, and emerging LLM-based interactive agents. Bridging computer science and linguistics, the course explores parallels between usage-based theories such as Construction Grammar and the probabilistic linguistic patterns large language models acquire from text, while also addressing the limits of current systems in reasoning, grounding, and embodiment. Students will study how dialogue systems interpret context, manage interaction, and support real-world communication, with attention to future directions including multimodal and human-robot dialogue. The course is project-based, and final projects may take either a computational or a linguistic orientation, from building dialogue systems to conducting data-driven analyses of language and interaction. No formal prerequisites are required, but students should have prior coursework or a substantive interest in computer science, linguistics, or both.

Advances in technologies for processing human languages have increasingly brought computational linguistics into contact with people. As such, what language reveals about people—and how AI algorithms make decisions affecting people based on their language—is of paramount concern. At the same time, contemporary algorithms for processing language offer powerful new tools for studying people and society on a large scale. Designed for students with grounding in computational linguistics, this course will examine the intersection of people, language, and algorithms with technical precision as well as an appreciation for human context. Topics will include: computational models of conversational interaction and power dynamics; emotions, sentiment, subjectivity, and politeness; toxic language; sociolinguistic variation; detection of attributes such as race and gender; issues of privacy, ethics, bias, and fairness, with special attention to minoritized speakers, languages, and dialects; and the use of large-scale language data for studying political framing and social movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.

This course focuses on computational issues in lexical semantics, with an emphasis on linguistic aspects of finding information in collections of documents. The underlying theme is the application of vector space representations, which have recently attracted renewed interest and research. We'll examine various problems connected with this theme, including idioms and collocations, lexical ambiguity and sense extension, document categorization, topic modeling and detection, and information extraction tasks. There will be several small-scale assignments, and students will jointly complete a project to be decided on once the class starts. Some familiarity and comfort with programming, mathematics, and statistics, in addition to linguistic concepts, is therefore desirable.

This is a project based course focusing on the design and implementation of systems that scale Natural Language Processing methods beyond English. The course will cover both multilingual and cross-lingual methods with an emphasis on zero-shot and few-shot approaches, as well as ‘silver’ dataset creation. Modules will include Cross-Lingual Information Extraction & Semantics, Cross-Language Information Retrieval, Multilingual Question Answering, Multilingual Structured Prediction, Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition, Typology, Morphology, as well as other non-English centric NLP methods. Students will be expected to work in small groups and pick from one of the modules to create a model based on state-of-the-art methods covered in the class. The course will be roughly three-quarters lecture based and one-quarter students presenting project updates periodically throughout the semester.

This course covers modern deep learning approaches for speech recognition, synthesis, and audio processing. Students learn PyTorch implementation of neural architectures, from foundational networks to state-of-the-art transformer models. Topics include basic text processing, audio feature extraction, automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and audio/music generation. The course emphasizes hands-on experience through weekly programming assignments using PyTorch. Prior programming experience in Python required; no previous signal processing or deep learning experience assumed. Designed for computational linguistics and computer science graduate students or advanced undergraduates.

RULE-THESIS is a year-long course designed to provide support and guidance for linguistics majors writing a senior honors thesis. In this seminar, the instructor will introduce students to the research and writing process, helping students to get organized, break down a project into manageable stages, avoid mistakes, present scholarly work clearly, incorporate feedback from peers, and keep on schedule as the year progresses. Using a textbook, published models, peer review, and workshop-format discussions of preliminary work, the instructor and seminar participants will discuss progress and problems at each stage. In addition, each student will have a thesis mentor who will be responsible for overseeing the content of the research and for evaluating the final version of the thesis. The seminar will meet "half-time" (approximately every other week) during the fall and spring semesters, with students receiving a total of 3 credits for the course, distributed across the year: 1 in the fall and 2 in the spring. The seminar is required for all students writing a linguistics thesis, and credit for the seminar will count toward linguistics major requirements

The Senior Honors Thesis Seminar is required for all linguistics majors writing a senior honors thesis, and the primary goal of the course is to provide additional support and guidance as you write your thesis (your thesis mentor will be responsible for overseeing the content of your research and for evaluating your final paper). In this course, the instructor and your peers will provide guidance and feedback on the research and writing process, helping you to get organized, break down the project into manageable stages, avoid mistakes, present your work clearly, and keep on schedule as the year progresses. Using a textbook, published models, peer review, and workshop-format discussions of preliminary work, we will discuss progress and problems at each stage. The seminar will meet "half-time" (approximately every other week) during the fall and spring semesters. Undergraduate students will receive 3 credits for the course, with an IP grade for the fall to be replaced with a letter grade upon successful completion of all course requirements in the spring. Credit for the seminar will count toward linguistics major requirements.

LING 401 This course is designed to provide students with a general graduate-level introduction to the scientific study of language. It is also open to advanced undergraduates. Our main goals include familiarizing you with core concepts and terminology in linguistics and with key methods and approaches to language study and how to apply them (to English and to other languages, including languages that you might know, and languages that you don’t know). We also discuss theories and research on how both first and other languages are learned by children and adults, as well as how computers are ‘taught’ to use and respond to human language. In addition, we explore how language shapes and is shaped by social, political, historical contexts, as well as personal and group identity and interpersonal relations. Throughout the course, we consider various applications of the scientific study of language, including in corporate, government, educational and legal arenas. If you are entering (or considering) a graduate program in linguistics or related field, this course will provide you with the foundation you need to succeed. If you are studying a non-native language, this course will provide you with additional tools to facilitate the learning process. Linguistics, the scientific study of language, interfaces with a wide variety of other fields (e.g., anthropology, sociology, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, politics, legal studies, and public policy), so you should be able to make important and exciting connections whatever your background and interests.

This course in Linguistic Field Methods develops skills in language documentation and description through practical work with native speakers of a language they are unfamiliar with. Students work to understand the structure of a non Indo-European language that is less commonly studied in the academy. The class will involve both the elicitation of linguistic data in oral interviews using English as a contact language, and also introducing students to more direct elicitation methods using prompts, props, and multimedia that try to avoid coloring speakers responses by the influence of a contact language. Students will develop skills in linguistic analysis, and in the art of crafting linguistic descriptions that can provide for a robust corpus of language data with the richness and flexibility to be taken up by researchers with different theoretical interests in the future. A goal of language documentation for the field of linguistics is to provide data from as many of the 6-7000 languages of the world that will no longer be spoken at the end of this century. Students will also focus on the dialogic process involved in the production of linguistic knowledge by engaging speakers as a source of utterances to study, and relying on their metalinguistic awareness, judgments, and reflection on their language. This course also introduces students to inscription methods used in fieldwork, including the latest technologies of audio and video recording, transcription, and digital archive building. In the end the aim is to sharpen one’s skills in linguistic analysis and in the process to produce an explanatory description of as much of the language as possible. Prerequisites for the class are previous courses at Ling Tier I and Tier II levels, or permission from the instructor. The course is open to undergraduate and graduate students. The aim of the course will be to produce a grammatical sketch of the language’s phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax, with grounding in the discourses of fieldwork interaction. Linguistics 404 will be useful to any student who foresees doing fieldwork in any area of linguistics or wants to learn how data are collected to help inform their use of linguistic data from the academic literature, and growing world of language archives and linguistic corpora. All students will participate in fieldwork tasks and are expected to attend at least 1 hour of office hours per week that speakers will schedule outside of class time. There will be frequent oral and written progress reports on the class’ work, and a final report on aspects of the language. Students are encouraged to form teams to work together on specific aspects of language that contribute to the overall representation of the language we develop over the duration of the course.

This course is a second class in Field Methods. It is a continuation of field methods I class from the fall Semester. It provides an opportunity for continuous fieldwork activity in investigating a language through one-on-one interviews with a native speaker. The class aims to train students on s-side data collection and management. As a follow-up we will work together as a class to develop a descriptive sketch of the language following from the previous semester, while simultaneously developing elicitation, transcription, and data analysis skills. Students will also be exposed to grant writing applications for the development of their own future projects in linguistics. Students will elicit, record, transcribe, and analyze data from a least documented language. The class as a whole will complete an online, searchable database of the language, and a (publicly available) description of various aspects of the language. Individually, students will be responsible for describing and analyzing one particular area of the language in depth, which can be related to any area of theoretical linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, or semantics as well as pragmatics and any aspect of surrogate language. This work will culminate in a final project that will be of publishable quality for onward presentation at a conference. Students who have already taken Field Methods in the Fall or previous years are welcome to enroll in this class.

If you could invite any two linguists, past or present, to dinner, who would you invite, and what would you talk about? • Would you like to see Pa:nini set William Jones straight on what Sanskrit was really like? Or maybe he could chat with Paul Kiparsky about the Elsewhere Condition. • Would you engage Janet Pierrehumbert and Sibawey on the Arabic lexicon? (Maybe they'd both prefer to talk about algebra.) Or would you invite Adam Albright and Karl Verner to a discussion of rules and exceptions to rules? • How about a conversation between Roman Jakobson and Pat Kuhl on acquisition, aphasia, and the latest brain research? Or would you rather just listen to Jakobson tell stories about his decades-long journey from Moscow to MIT via Prague, Copenhagen, and New York, and about all the linguists he met and worked with on the way? (Was he really smuggled across the Swedish border in a coffin?) • Would you hope for grateful admiration, such as Morris Halle might have for Nikolay Trubetskoy, his mentor's mentor? Or would you be itching to see the sparks fly between Rasmus Rask and Jakob Grimm over who really discovered "Grimm's Law", or Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield over the scientific relevance of "psychological reality"? • Would you put Noam Chomsky and B. F. Skinner in the same room? Or would you not know who to invite, since you don't really know who the great linguists of the past were, what they thought and wrote about, and how they influenced what we think and write about today? Charles Hockett, in the introduction to a new edition of Bloomfield's 1933 opus, Language, had some strong words for those who "deny [their] scholarly debt" to past work: One of Bloomfield's crucial teachings was his insistence on the cumulative nature of linguistics, as of any science. We ignore the achievements of our predecessors not only to our individual detriment but also greatly to the peril or our collective scientific enterprise, and that is something no scholar has the moral right to do. If you agree with Hockett's sentiment, rather than Henry Ford's more famous "History is bunk," then you should be interested in Ling 407, History of Linguistics. In this class, we'll join the ongoing conversation as we read and discuss important work by linguists from antiquity to the present, setting these writings on the one hand in their historical and intellectual context, and on the other hand juxtaposing them across time so that they speak to each other and to us on themes of mutual concern. Course requirements will include plenty of reading, class discussion, and presentations. Written requirements will include compilation of a notebook of big ideas, historical background, and quotable quotes, as well as a final paper that imagines what a conversation between these great thinkers might really be like. The course is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. For undergraduates, Ling 407 counts toward the Tier III major requirement.

Are you curious about the ancient language of the pharaohs? Have you ever walked past hieroglyphic writing in a museum and thought ‘I wish I could read that?’ Are you a linguist with an interest in dead languages, Afroasiatic languages, or less-commonly-taught languages? If so, this course might just be for you. The goal of the course is to obtain basic/intermediate reading skills in Middle Egyptian, an Afroasiatic language written primarily in hieroglyphics and spoken about 4,000 years ago. The course will also focus on learning about and analyzing the grammar of Egyptian, especially its phonology, morphology and syntax. The course will feature extensive practice in reading and writing hieroglyphs as well as assigned readings on the linguistic analysis of Middle Egyptian. It is intended for students with some prior training in linguistics and/or experience with classical languages.

Linguistic Typology is an introduction to the cross-linguistic study of grammatical features of language. The course covers formal and functional approaches to the typology of phonological and morphosyntactic phenomena. Students will be introduced to 1) key topics in typology including word order, correlations and sampling methodology, grammatical relations, and phonological inventories; 2) the status of universals in typology, and formal and functional explanations for those universal patterns; 3) influential frameworks and tools for typological research including implicational hierarchies, semantic maps, canonical typology, and combinatorial typology. Each student will choose one language to work with, and as we discuss each linguistic phenomenon in the course, students will write up descriptions of how that particular phenomenon works in their language of study, comparing how the features of that language fit into cross-linguistic patterns.

This course is designed as a one-semester graduate-level introduction to the basics of phonetics and phonology, that is, to the linguistic analysis of the sound patterns of the languages of the world. It is divided into four sections: 1. Articulatory phonetics (how speech sounds are made) 2. Acoustic phonetics (how sound travels and how sound is measured) 3. Segmental phonology (how sounds contrast and alternate) 4. Suprasegmental phonology (how sounds are grouped into hierarchical constituents) At the end of the class, students will have learned the terms and concepts central to phonology and phonetics, and will have acquired basic data analysis skills (including IPA transcription, recording and basic acoustic analysis, and approaches to solving phonology problems), and will be prepared to move on to more advanced courses. In order to accomplish these goals, students will participate in daily production and transcription drills and complete daily homework assignments to reinforce concepts and skills. There will be four (non-cumulative) quizzes, one for each quarter of the course. Prerequisites and course sequencing: This course has no prerequisites, but is itself prerequisite for all other graduate-level courses in phonology and phonetics. Ling410, Phonology and Phonetics I, is the first in a three-course sequence.

Phonology is the study of sound patterns in human language. After a brief overview of articulatory phonetics (how the human body actually makes speech sounds), we will investigate the central questions of phonological theory, including: 1. Contrast. How do languages organize sounds to distinguish words? What sound contrasts are possible and impossible? How do language sound inventories differ and in what ways are all inventories the same? More formally, are there universal contrastive "features"? If so, where do they come from? 2. Constraints. What constraints do languages put on sequences of sounds? Are such constraints universal or language-specific? If universal, how can languages differ? If specific, why do certain patterns recur so often? 3. Alternations. What happens if sound sequences arise (for example by the addition of affixes) that violate the constraints? What kinds of changes do we typically see (or not)? How can we use formal language to express testable hypotheses about possible and impossible alternations? Which hypotheses are actually supported and which are not? 4. Suprasegmentals and prosody. How do languages group sounds into larger constituents, including syllables, stress feet, and phrases? What are the universal and language-specific properties of these constituents, and how does formal language help us express them? 5. Grounding vs. abstraction. Formal language allows us to succintly express very abstract principles and "rules." Is such abstraction necessary? Is it dangerous? How far away from phonetic "grounding" should phonology be allowed to range? 6. Variation and change. What do our theories of contrast, constraints, alternations, and suprasegmentals predict about sociolinguistic variation, historical change, first language acquisition and second language learning? How do variation and change inform phonological theory, and how does phonological theory help us understand variation and change? The course will emphasize hands-on data analysis of increasing complexity, with exercises both in-class and for homework. Quizzes spaced throughout the semester will check for comprehension, and a final (small-scale) independent research project will allow students to demonstrate the skills they have learned. Text: Zsiga, Elizabeth. 2013. The Sounds of Language. Wiley-Blackwell. Graduate students: Ling 411 is required for all PhD and MS students in Linguistics as part of the departmental distribution requirements. There are no prerequisites for graduate students. (Note: in previous years, Ling 410 was prerequisite for Ling 411. This is no longer the case.) Undergraduate students: Ling 411 is open to undergraduates and can count toward meeting the Tier III Linguistics major requirements. Undergraduate students must take Ling 215 (Sounds of Language) as a prerequisite.

Course Description: Morphology is quite literally the ‘study of form’—in language, the formal means of expressing grammatical and grammaticalized conceptual categories encoded in actual and potential word-signs. This course provides a basic introduction to traditional and more contemporary approaches to word formation and grammatical categorization. We will consider previous attempts to define word and morpheme, the types of factors that condition morphological realization, the notion of paradigm, the nature of lexical entries and competing views about the lexicon, the place of morphology in the overall architecture of a grammar, the characterization of morphological processes as derivational vs. inflectional, and other related topics. We will also devote a considerable amount of class time to working through language data in order to increase your familiarity with some of the more interesting morphological phenomena found among the world’s languages. Course Objectives: The ultimate objective of the course is for you to acquire and deepen your skills in analyzing linguistic data, including gaining practice in using data to build arguments in support of an analysis. You will also learn about some of the major approaches to morphological analysis that have been proposed within a generative grammatical framework. Prerequisites: LING 401 General Linguistics or equivalent; a course in phonology is highly recommended. For undergraduate linguistics majors, this course satisfies the Tier III requirement as a follow-up to LING 224 Grammatical Analysis. Having taken LING 215 Sounds of Language is also highly recommended.

From Asp to Zed: Decoding the World's Writing Systems The thousands of languages in the world have been written down in hundreds of different orthographies: alphabets, abjads, logograms, hieroglyphs, runes, syllabaries, "visible speech," and more. In this class, we'll take a hands-on approach to deciphering the many relationships between spoken and written language. Each class we'll take a sample of a different writing system, and work together to figure out how the symbols and the sounds match up. We'll explore the history and social importance of each code, practice creating new messages, and create some new orthographies of our own. Do you think you can do better than the Ancient Egyptians?

After a brief introduction to the philosophy and methods of generative grammar, this course examines some of the basic aspects of modern syntactic theory. It starts with an in depth discussion of the need for postulating syntactic structures and then moves on to examine how best to account for phenomena such as word order variation, the distribution and referential properties of noun phrases, and the differences among clausal types. These phenomena will be analyzed mainly through the insights offered by the Principles and Parameters framework. The course consists of lecture presentations, class discussion and intensive problem solving and argumentation on the part of the students. In addition to the Tuesday-Thursday lectures, it comprises a weekly discussion session led by the Teaching Asssistant; this provides an opportunity for students to ask further clarification questions, go over issues that one might feel were not covered in sufficient detail in class, and discuss the weekly homework assignments. LING/SPAN 527 is the first segment of a two-semester sequence which aims to familiarize the students with the assumptions, goals and methodology of generative syntax, while also providing them the opportunity to explore a few topics in some depth through readings from the primary literature. The second semester course will discuss the relation between the Principles & Parameters and the Minimalist framework.

This course explores arguments and argument structure in syntax and semantics, offering students an introduction to the integrated study of syntax, semantics, lexical meaning, and morphology. The emphasis is on theoretical and architectural questions raised by close structural analysis of argument structure in a wide range of languages. Representative phenomena include causatives; statives; passives; unaccusatives and unergatives; resultatives; incorporation; applicatives.

The Semitic language family is one of the oldest attested language families which is still spoken today. It includes languages spoken in Africa, Middle East and Western Asia, languages which figure prominently in the religious, political and cultural issues of our time and of history. This course aims at familiarizing students with the grammatical structure of a number of ancient and modern Semitic languages (e.g., Hebrew, Standard Arabic and dialects, Amharic, Akkadian, Aramaic and others). Topics to be covered include (but are not limited to) root and pattern morphology, the construct state, the derivation of Semitic word order, as well as aspect and modality. By the end of the class, students will have a basic understanding of the Semitic family and its special characteristics. The course is driven by class discussion, homework assignments and readings. Homework assignments will possibly include fieldwork with native speakers of Semitic languages in the D.C. area. Previous study of a Semitic language is encouraged, but not required.

This course begins with a three-week introduction to formal tools used in semantics and pragmatics (set theory, basic logic, functions). Then, the bulk of the semester is spend on reading and discussion of original papers and overview articles covering a representative range of contemporary research in these areas. We may work with readings on the following topics, as well as others based on class preferences: argument structure, predicates, adjectives, definiteness, quantification, tense, aspect, modality, negation, conjunction, presupposition, implicature, topic and focus, information structure, discourse particles. The goal of the course is to give students a practical understanding of the nature of linguistic meaning, an ability to read in semantics/pragmatics, and a foundation for advanced courses in these areas.

This is an interdisciplinary course on the psychology of language (psycholinguistics) designed to introduce students to the important issues, ideas, and scientific research in this field. We will cover the cognitive processes of speech perception, word recognition, sentence processing, language production, and language acquisition, across language modalities (signed and spoken) and in a range of populations (e.g. healthy adults and children; multilinguals; and individuals with brain damage). We will explore a range of perspectives on these issues by reading and discussing research papers from psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive science, and computer science. To allow students to engage with all of these perspectives, the course will provide background on relevant research methods (e.g. eyetracking, brain imaging, artificial language learning) as well as practical training on how to read and understand scientific papers in an unfamiliar field. Prerequisites: Prior coursework in linguistics, psychology, or cognitive science; or permission of instructor.

When children develop their native language capacity, they acquire properties for which there is no evidence in the speech they encounter; these are so-called “emergent phenomena.” Furthermore, children sometimes acquire systems that are significantly different from those of their parents and the language undergoes rapid structural change, a “phase transition.” We can understand emergent phenomena and phase transitions through a principled approach to language acquisition by young children. We will consider the methods, successes and failures of 19th-century work on language change, which was the foundation for a new discipline of linguistics and of great interest to thinkers in evolutionary biology, beginning with Darwin, and early researchers in what we now call political science, including Marx. We will then move to language acquisition, arguments from the poverty of the stimulus and cue-based acquisition. We will investigate how historical change can be understood (within limits) through children’s acquisition and how it enables us to understand the birth and death of languages more generally. This will involve a crucial distinction between external and internal languages and new methods for historical linguistics. Throughout the course we will see how linguistics is a lead science in understanding change and complex dynamics quite generally. Texts: Lightfoot 2006 How New Languages Emerge. Cambridge UP. Ian Roberts 2007 Diachronic syntax. Oxford UP. Requirements: students need at least one course in generative syntax and will make a class presentation and write a paper dealing with a specific syntactic change in some language. Syllabus: Week 1 The beginnings: 19th-century work on language change: methods, successes and failures. Reading: Lightfoot chs 1, 2. Week 2 Syntax as a complex system, poverty of stimulus reasoning. What is learned and how. Reading: L ch 3 Week 3 Models of acquisition: learning algorithms, cue-based acquisition. Reading: L ch 4 Week 4 Phenomena of syntactic change in English: Modal auxiliaries, verb movement, be+part, change in meaning of like, repent, ail, etc. Methodologies. Reading: Roberts ch 1 Week 5 Explanations for historical changes through acquisition (thresholds and phase transitions). E-language vs. I-language. The birth and death of languages (creoles, language endangerment) Reading: L ch 5, R ch 3 Week 6 Other explanations for change: grammar evaluation, principles of change (grammaticalization, UG biases). Gradualism. Reading: L ch 6, R ch 2 Week 7 More case studies: lexical passives, quantifiers, group genitives, infinitives. Reading: R ch 4 Week 8 Other languages: verb movement, null subjects. Reading: L ch 7, R ch 5 Week 9 Reconstruction of proto-syntax. Reading: Journal of Linguistics debate Week 10 Evolution of the language faculty: mutations and natural selection. Week 11 How diachronic syntax differs from synchronic work and how it illuminates some of the idealizations of synchronic work. Reading: L ch 8 Week 12 New methods for historical linguistics, working with corpora. Research topics: microvariation and abstract categories. Linguistics as a lead science in complex dynamics. Weeks 13-14 Student presentations.

It is a course for the beginners with no prior knowledge of Sanskrit. It consists of readings (from classical and Vedic) and discussions of its relationship with Greek, Latin, and other classical Indo-European languages. The course can be used to fulfill the language requirement for students in linguistics. 1. Introduction to language and its relationship with other IE languages. 2. The Devanagari Alphabet 3. A brief survey of its grammar 4. Readings: a. passages from the Mahabharata b. selections from the Hitopadesha c. selections from the Rigveda Note: The final grade for the course is determined on the basis of the classroom reading skill and a final paper which include some translation and interpretation of short texts.

This course focuses on how and why languages change over time, and on how we can study the linguistic history of individual languages and language families. In the first part of the course, we’ll discuss the basic nature of linguistic change, and how diachronic change is reflected within the synchronic grammars of speakers. We’ll also discuss common changes in phonetics, phonological organization, syntax, and semantics. In the second part, we’ll study how internal reconstruction and the Comparative Method can be used to develop hypotheses about the development of related languages, with and without a documented history of written records. Here, we’ll focus especially (though not exclusively) on the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Bantu. Finally, we’ll consider the close relationship between diachronic change and synchronic variation in exploring the factors that drive linguistic change over time.

This is an interdisciplinary course on child language acquisition designed to introduce students to what is known about the cognitive and neural processes underlying children’s acquisition of language, as well as the scientific process through which this knowledge was constructed. We will cover universals of language acquisition across languages and modalities (signed and spoken); similarities and differences between child and adult language learners; psychological and linguistic theories of the learning process; and the influential (and controversial) idea that humans are born with innate knowledge of language (a “Universal Grammar”). We will explore a range of perspectives on these issues by reading and discussing research papers from psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive science. To allow students to engage with all of these perspectives, the course will provide background on relevant research methodologies (e.g. experiments testing infants’ or children’s linguistic knowledge; artificial language learning; brain imaging) as well as practical training on how to read and understand scientific papers in an unfamiliar field.

This course is the second in a two-course sequence on Middle Egyptian, an Afroasiatic language written primarily in hieroglyphics and spoken about 4,000 years ago. The goal of this course is to obtain intermediate reading skills in Middle Egyptian, such that students will be able to read a variety of ancient text types with ease. The course will also focus on learning about and analyzing advanced topics in the grammar of Egyptian, especially its morphology and syntax. The course will feature extensive practice in reading and writing hieroglyphs as well as assigned readings on the linguistic analysis of Middle Egyptian.

Fish swim, birds fly and humans talk. Just as fish are genetically equipped to move in the way they do, so human beings have the cognitive properties to talk and to understand speech in the way they do. In this class, we will seek to characterize that ability (a "language organ"), which may vary depending on where a person is raised: people have different capacities depending on whether they were raised in Toronto, Tokyo or Tromso. We shall tease apart general properties of the human language capacity, common to the species, from specific capacities that are a function of initial experience. We shall examine how the interplay of nature and nurture results in people coming to know so much more than they experience in childhood. We shall attend to (a) language variation, looking at languages as variants of a kind of basic "periodic table" which is genetically prescribed, (b) the acquisition of language by children in the first few years of life, as the basic periodic table develops into the specific capacity of, say, a speaker of some form of French, and (c) the capacity to understand spoken language. We shall compare what is known about the human language organ with other aspects of our cognitive make-up, considering how human cognition (mind) and the language faculty have been viewed by thinkers like Plato, Descartes, Darwin and others. And we will seek to link this big picture approach to actual analyses, considering how analyses need to be shaped in order to make sense in this broad approach to human cognition, noting how well known analyses in the literature often fail to contribute to our understanding of human cognition.

Pragmatics is the field of linguistics which studies how aspects of meaning encoded by grammar interact with the context of use. These interactions come in many forms, including the following traditional subareas of pragmatics: 1. Indexicality: the context in which an utterance is made help determine what it literally means. 2. Implicature: the context in which an utterance is made help determine what meaning the speaker is able to communicate. 3. Presupposition: The context helps determine which future utterances are natural and which are not. 4. Speech acts: An utterance helps create the context going forward. In this course, we will begin with a historically informed overview of these four traditional areas and then move on to current topics of research and debate. Topics will be decided based on student interest, but likely candidates include the following: 1. Reference and dexis in sign languages: the spatiotemporal modality of sign languages allows them to express reference, deixis, and perspective in different ways from spoken languages. 2. Information structure and discourse structure: Advances in pragmatics have taken us beyond traditional concepts of presupposition and speech acts to create integrated theories of how a discourse evolves. Requirements: Reading, participation, homework assignments, group or individual presentations.

This course introduces the basics of a range of topics in Japanese linguistics, including Japanese phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, language variation, and language acquisition. The course objectives are (a) to familiarize the students with basic notions and terminology used in Japanese linguistics; (b) to familiarize the students with major issues in different areas of Japanese linguistics; and (c) to provide the students with hands-on experience in linguistic analysis using Japanese data. Upon successful completion of the course, students should be able to better understand the underlying structures of Japanese and how linguistic analysis is carried out. Rigorous participation in class discussion, completion of reading assignments prior to class, various data analysis/written assignments, mid-term and final exams, library research, and a term project will be required. The course is conducted in English.

Linguists, language educators and researchers of literature and culture conduct discourse analysis for a variety of purposes: to capture writing and literacy development, to characterize teacher-student classroom interaction, to describe social practices at various institutions, or to reveal aspects of an author’s style. This course introduces students to the socioculturally-oriented analysis of language using Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as an approach that enables discourse analysts to systematically account for the connections between grammar, discourse, and social activity no matter what their research data are: learner written texts, spoken conversations, institutional documents, or literary discourse. The course will cover the fundamental conceptual and methodological tools the SFL approach makes available for such an analysis. The course will start with the overarching assumptions about the SFL model of language as social semiotic and then explore its specific theoretical constructs, such as genre, register, metafunctions, and the grammatical systems that are used to encode them. Three fundamental questions will underlie our exploration: How is language structured for use? What choices do language users make? How do these choices function in various contexts of use? Throughout the course, participants will be discussing studies that demonstrate how the analytical constructs and tools can be applied to the analysis of language data in various contexts. We will examine studies of oral and written texts in diverse registers and genres, aspects of second language acquisition at various educational and performance levels, second/foreign language pedagogy, curriculum development, teacher education, and assessment. Those interested in literary texts will discover how the approach can shed new light on the study of literature as a phenomenon of languaging in a particular way. In the course, participants will: • use a textbook to learn about the major tenets and analytical categories of the SFL model • complete workbook exercises to identify and label text structures • engage in the analysis of texts (in English, German or other languages of interest) to reveal patterns of language use • discuss additional readings and applications of the theory to expand their understanding of how the model contributes to discourse description and interpretation in various contexts or languages (particularly those of interest to the course participants) • develop a project (a final paper) where they apply the framework to an area of research interest Topics ? Introduction to the SFL model of language: historical developments and major assumptions ? Register and genre ? Experiential meanings: Transitivity ? Logical meanings: Clause complex ? Interpersonal meanings: Mood and Modality ? Interpersonal meanings: Appraisal ? Textual meanings: Theme Materials Eggins, S. (2004). An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics. London: Continuum. Martin, J., Matthiessen, C.M.I.M., & Painter, C. (2010). Deploying functional grammar. Beijing: The Commercial Press. Matthiessen, C. M. I. M., Lam, M., & Kazuhiro Teruya, K.. (2010). Key Terms in Systemic Functional Linguistics. London: Continuum. Course packet Recommended materials M. A. K. Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C.M. I. M. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Hodder Arnold. 3rd edition. Course requirements Regular attendance and class participation—30% Workbook and other textual analyses—20% Discussion Board—10% Article presentation—10% Final project—30% Note: All courses in the German Department follow the Honor Code of Georgetown University. In cases of alleged violations in graduate courses, the procedures adopted by the Graduate School will be followed.

This course uses a hands-on approach to first introduce a range of psycholinguistics research methods, and then to focus on eye-tracking in second language acquisition (SLA). No prior experience with any psycholinguistics methods, including eye tracking, is required. The course covers: Part One: • The theoretical assumptions, rationale and techniques for using a range of different psycholinguistic research methods in SLA research, and how each provides insight into language processing and learning. The methods discussed will depend on the interests of the class and will be determined in the first class, but can include reaction time, priming, neuro- and/or electrophysiological imaging, corpus analysis and diary studies. The review will conclude with eye tracking. Part Two: • Major applications of eye-tracking in L2 research, including text-based eye-tracking and visual world paradigm. • Practicalities of eye-tracking, including experiment design, selection of eye-movement measures, and data interpretation. • Techniques for collecting and analyzing eye-movement data using Tobii Pro software. By the end of the course, students will be prepared to critically evaluate psycholinguistic research studies, draft a design for an experiment with their tool of interest, and apply this method to their own research. The class will be interactive, with a combination of lectures, including guest lectures, and small and whole group discussions, and lab-based activities.

This course addresses theoretical and practical aspects of questionnaire research methodology specific to language learning and education research. The course canvasses issues relating to survey research planning, design, instrument development, implementation, data analysis, data interpretation, and reporting. In particular, the course addresses research issues unique to survey methods including sources of bias and error (e.g., from sampling methods and non-response), aspects of measurement reliability (focusing especially on rating scales), and epistemological orientations and assumptions underpinning language questionnaire research generally.

Interviews are among the most widely used methodological tools across the humanities and the social sciences. In linguistics, interview data are elicited and analyzed for thematic content and for discourse construction in response to a variety of research purposes. This course will provide students theoretical understanding and hands-on familiarization with the design, conduct, and analysis of interviews of six types: ethnographic, narrative, phenomenological, grounded theory, life story, and case study. We will cover:

· ontological and epistemological foundations of qualitative interviewing and different ways of theorizing the use of qualitative interviews in linguistics research

· designing an interview study, designing a qualitative interview protocol

· the ethics of doing interviews, positionality and power dynamics, and researcher reflexivity

· interviews as a social practice

· strategies for interviewing

· methods for analyzing and representing interviews

· interview data in English, other languages, and multilingual-translanguaged interviews

· presentation of interview data in written reports

Students will practice with each other so they can develop good interviewing abilities and plan for the co-constructed nature of interviews. Students will also get experience analyzing interview data using MAXQDA software, which handles non-Roman script languages best.

This graduate-level seminar focuses on developing requisite foundational knowledge and critical awareness of various practical approaches to foreign language instruction in the American educational context, particularly at the college level (e.g., communicative, task-based, ecological-semiotic, etc.). Students become informed about (1) cognitive, socio-cultural, linguistic, and affective factors influencing the principles and processes of learning, particularly instructed second language learning; (2) the historical, educational, institutional, and curricular context within which instruction takes place; (3) pedagogical approaches to developing adult learners’ second language ability; and (4) the roles they could and should take on as teachers in order to enhance student learning. Special emphasis in the course is on the literacy-oriented approaches to FL teaching that aim to integrate language and content instruction and thus address the challenges identified by the FL professionals today (e.g., MLA 2007 report). Students explore ways of transcending the language/content divide and developing curricula and courses where it becomes possible to address various thematic areas and at the same time explicitly attend to advanced language development. To that end, students analyze discourses of textual and media genres (e.g., personal and public narratives, political appeal, speech, exposition, recipe, catastrophe film, political poster, etc.), design instructional sequences based on these analyses and construct text-based tasks that facilitate adult second language acquisition. All of the activities in the course recognize various backgrounds in SLA theory and teaching practice and draw on them to socialize students into becoming self-directed and reflective teachers, a life-long process. Assignments: • Readings, classroom and online discussions • Class observations • 2 Journals and 3 classroom observation reports • Text didacticization • Semester project (Qualified undergraduate students interested in teaching foreign languages may be allowed to enroll.)

GERM/LING 546 Telecollaboration: From Theory to Practice Telecollaboration involves Internet-mediated exchange between geographically distant parties of different national/cultural backgrounds for the purposes of language and cultural learning. An additional distinguishing feature of telecollaboration is the opportunity for learners to develop “online literacies” that emphasize cooperation, participation, and reciprocity. The rise of telecollaboration thus marks a shift towards new approaches and contexts for language and intercultural learning, requiring a critical examination of its place in the foreign language curriculum. In this graduate-level seminar, we will investigate the theoretical underpinnings of telecollaboration, considering ways in which telecollaborative praxis is based on and emerges from an understanding of second language acquisition processes. We will examine various models of telecollaboration and how they differentially facilitate languacultural development. At the same time, and in recognition of the challenges common to telecollaboration, we will evaluate strategies for mitigating potential problem areas. The ultimate goal is to prepare course participants to plan and conduct telecollaborative exchanges that are linked to a specific curricular context and that result in measurable learning outcomes.

Evaluation is critical to understanding the outcomes of language programs. In conducting evaluation, it is important to take a comprehensive approach that considers the needs of learners and instructors, the requirements and capacities of administrators, parents and other stakeholders, the values of the discipline and the contributions of the program to the local, national and general society. However, recent research at the Assessment and Evaluation Language Resource Center shows that K-12 language program evaluation is frequently misunderstood and infrequently implemented; evaluation at the postsecondary level is also inconsistent. Thus, this course provides participants a theoretical and practical approach to language program evaluation in the K-12 and post-secondary context. The course will use both scenario-based and actual participant contexts to explore the concepts we discuss and to identify areas of potential success and challenge for implementation. During the course, participants will first define program evaluation for their own contexts. Next, they will learn to design a program evaluation for their own macro or micro contexts by setting goals, determining outcomes and defining the instruments needed to conduct the evaluation. Participants will also utilize and adapt existing instruments or develop new instruments for their context. Finally, participants will learn how to best communicate, apply and implement evaluation results to a variety of contexts.

This course will introduce you to central questions, theories, debates, and research findings in the area of second language learning and teaching, a field that is concerned with the central questions: How are second languages learned and how might they best be taught? We will address this and many other questions central to this quickly growing field such as: - Is it possible to attain ‘native-like’ proficiency if you start learning a language after childhood? - What does it mean to be ‘bilingual’? Do you have to speak both languages equally well? - How might language learning occur most effectively after childhood? - What roles do conversational interaction and receiving feedback play in second-language development? - How do individual differences such as intelligence, aptitude, and motivation affect L2 development? Are some people just better than others at second language learning? - Are there differences in how languages may best be learned across different contexts (e.g., naturalistic exposure vs. classroom instruction vs. study abroad)? What about through different teaching methods? - What is the role of technology in second language learning? Can we learn languages just as well online as we do face-to-face? - What are the cognitive benefits of knowing more than one language? Can knowing another language affect the way you think? We will accomplish this by critically evaluating foundational and current work in these areas, as well as considering how theories and research findings can inform current educational policies and practice. The class will be interactive, with a combination of asynchronous video lectures, podcasts, discussion boards, and synchronous small-group and whole-class discussions. The course is designed for any students (for example, linguistics, education, world languages, psychology, anthropology etc.) interested in deepening their understanding of second language learning scholarship and developing the ability to be a critical consumer of research. Note: this class is available at both the undergraduate (251) and graduate (553) level. The course levels will differ in terms of the depth required of assignments and the final paper.

This course uses a hands-on, interactive approach to introduce basic design, measurement, analysis, and inference procedures used in applied linguistics quantitative research, with an emphasis on understanding and using statistics and on developing foundational skills with computerized statistical tools. More broadly, the course addresses a range of topics critical to the accurate and ethical use of quantitative methods in language studies, including: (a) the purposes and roles of research; (b) literature review and the generation of research questions; (c) study design strategies for gathering, organizing, and analyzing quantitative data; (d) the importance of accuracy (and error) in developing and using measures and other data elicitation procedures; (e) critical reading of research reports; and (f) current concerns with the use of statistical significance testing, the role to be played by power analysis, effect sizes, and confidence intervals, and the future of quantitative research in applied linguistics.

This course introduces students to the field of L2 writing, which investigates how people become good writers in multiple languages – whether they are second/foreign/heritage languages, as all are implied in the term “second language” or “L2”. It also examines the implications of the research base for how to support the development of writing among linguistically and culturally diverse writers. Topics covered will include (1) the linguistic challenges L2 writers face (e.g., in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and linguistic resources needed to meet voice, audience, and rhetorical demands of diverse genres and academic/professional communities); (2) pedagogical options for L2 writing (e.g., use of multiple drafts, teacher and peer feedback, writing conferences, individual and peer editing); (3) rhetorical transfer and plagiarism, probably the two most contested topics regarding the relationship between literacy and culture; (4) the roles of agency, identity, and power in shaping success among multilingual writers; and (5) the impact of new technologies on multilingual literacies. These topics will be tailored to the particular literacy contexts that enrolled students want to know about, such as: heritage language curricula, EFL settings, Writing Centers, programs for adults with limited schooling, or k-12 education for English Language Learners. The course assignments will offer choices for either traditional projects (e.g., a literature review paper, a proposal for an L2 writing study) or hands-on mini-projects (e.g., developing and delivering a workshop for teacher/tutor training, analyzing L2 texts, designing corpus/concordancing activities for L2 writers). By balancing both research and pedagogical interests, the course seeks to appeal to students with diverse interests and with different career goals. It will serve students who want to develop cutting-edge professional expertise in the teaching of L2 writing as well as those who want to explore possibilities for conducting research on L2 writing. The course is open to graduate and undergraduate students.

Language policy refers to any attempt to manage what shape language takes or how it is used. Most commonly, language policy is thought of as attempts by powerful actors, like governments or educational institutions, to affect what language will be used, valued, and learned. Such decisions have serious implications for individuals, groups, communities, and societies. For example, language policies affect who has access to work, education, healthcare, the legal system, and the democratic process. As a result, the study of language policy is necessarily an interdisciplinary undertaking, bringing together insights from areas like linguistics, law, political science, economics, anthropology, sociology, history, and education. In this class, we will explore how governments and institutions attempt to manage linguistic diversity and cultivate particular types of linguistic repertoires across a variety of different settings

The course covers quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods linguistics research and will teach you how to: * Identify research problems, areas and questions * Prepare IRB applications and informed consent documents (and address IRB queries) * Address ethical concerns involved in conducting research with human participants * Come up with predictions * Decide on appropriate and feasible methods for answering research questions or addressing areas of research interest * Choose, design, and/or adapt data collection techniques, and pilot-test them * Understand validity and reliability in quantitative research * Define and operationalize variables * Understand the importance of credibility, transferability and dependability in qualitative research, together with triangulation * Collect, transcribe, describe, code, and analyze data * Understand how mixed-methods research works, layering different perspectives * Use a variety of qual-quant tools for data coding and analysis (e.g., SuperLab, Excel, MAXQDA) * Analyze and critique research designs in the published literature * Write up and present research reports (focus on conference presentations, paper submissions) This course is suitable for students at various stages of graduate study and is designed to accommodate the research goals of novice and more experienced students. Assignments and assessment in this course reflect the fact that class participants are likely to be at different stages in their graduate study. For example, master’s students and beginning doctoral students may want to use the class for gaining familiarity with how to submit an IRB and design a pilot study, select, adapt, or create materials for data collection, or to try out different coding techniques. More advanced students can pilot aspects of their thesis or dissertation work. All students can expect to gain exposure to a variety of methods across a range of areas, including psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and instructed as well as corpus approaches to second language acquisition/applied linguistics, while also having opportunities to delve more deeply into specific areas of interest.

The work of cognitive linguists falls under the general category of functional approaches to linguistic structure. Theories of grammar in Cognitive Linguistics emphasize the centrality of meaning and communicative context, and the role of cognitive processes such as memory and attention. This course will elucidate the major themes and core concepts of these theories, including Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar; categorization and prototype theory; frame semantics; Construction Grammar; metaphor and metonymy; and mental spaces and blending. Of particular emphasis will be the application of these theories to analyze sentences in terms of both form and meaning. Implications for linguistic typology, first and second language acquisition, computational linguistics, language pedagogy, and discourse and ideology will also be explored, depending on the particular interests represented in students taking the class.

GERM 488/LING 588: Computer Assisted Language Learning and Teaching As computer-based technologies have taken on an increasingly central role in foreign language instruction, Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is no longer a specialty area. Accordingly, this course serves as an introduction to the broader field of CALL and various techno-pedagogical applications that fall under this umbrella. Students will understand the growth of CALL in foreign language (L2) instruction, examine the pedagogical rationale for utilizing CALL, and evaluate various applications for L2 instruction. In addition to critical examination of learning technologies, students will develop their own abilities to utilize and apply technologies relevant to L2 instruction. There will be three major course assignments, and they will be showcased on a jointly-constructed class website: 1) Research brief: Students will select, read and summarize one article/chapter from a scholarly publication (i.e., journal or edited volume). These text-based summaries should also address the articles’ contributions to the growth of CALL as a field of scholarship. 2) Technology review: Students will select and evaluate one particular technology or application that can be used to foster language development. The technology reviews will be delivered using a non-text-based multimedia platform (e.g., video, podcast, etc.). 3) Teaching unit: In the context of a particular L2 curriculum, students will design a teaching unit that incorporates CALL in an integral way. In all cases, the course will emphasize the primacy of sound pedagogy when using CALL for L2 instruction.

Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) is an educational framework for the theory and practice of teaching language. It has been influenced by philosophy of education, theories of second language acquisition, empirical findings on effective instructional techniques, and the exigencies of language learning in contemporary society. Since its origins in the literature in the 1980s (though emerging from earlier ideas), TBLT has evolved from a handful of pedagogic principles and ‘methods’ to a broad-based foundation for the implementation of full-scale language programs. Though there is broad interest in the potential value of TBLT to foster worthwhile language teaching and learning, there is also considerable diversity in the theoretical scope, applied practice, and research that corresponds with the TBLT name. This course reviews issues at the core of TBLT. Following a brief introduction to the history and origins of TBLT, we will explore applied research and practice in TBLT, covering the topics of needs analysis, curriculum, instruction, task design, teachers, learners, assessment, and program evaluation. We will read a collection of classic and recent texts discussing the TBLT framework. Students will carry out a semester long project that will be research- or teaching-focused, according to their interests and needs.

This graduate seminar explores the scholarly areas and research perspectives in the teaching of English in international contexts. The course presents case studies of multilingual countries particularly from the global South to recognize and identify a) the diverse and complex norms of using, learning and teaching English in various international contexts, b) the, cultural references, communication styles and negotiation strategies of multilingual learners of English, and c) a call for reconceptualization of language standards and teaching of English. It would help them reflect on the traditionalist English language teaching and learning frameworks, explore atomistic vs. holistic approaches, computer assisted language teaching, and pedagogical preparedness as more complex uses and varieties of English emerge in the international contexts.

What does it mean to refer to groups of people (immigrants, older people) as waves, or floods, or tsunamis? What problem does “glass ceiling” name, and how has use of the term changed over time? Does a “rose by any other name” really smell as sweet? What results from calling a package of almonds “honest” or coal technology “clean”? Metaphorical language pervades everyday talk and interaction. It structures how we understand abstract concepts, and it shapes—and is shaped by—the personal, social, and political realities that we experience every day. Because of its power and ubiquity in language, it is important for linguists and social scientists with an interest in discourse, cognition, and communication to know how to identify and analyze metaphors and “names.” This course provides an introduction to metaphor and the many domains in which it can be studied and leveraged. We will engage with the theoretical foundations of metaphor research and examine the intersections among different disciplines; learn a common code used by researchers to identify metaphors in talk and text; and, crucially, we will explore how metaphors appear (and reappear) in public and private discourses. One of our key responsibilities will be to identify and share examples encountered in communications (e.g., face-to-face conversations, social media, news media, political messaging, narratives, product labels, institutional discourse) that can be examined through the lens of the theoretical work with which the class has engaged. We will focus, for example, on how metaphor infuses talk about health and medicine, gender identity, the environment, interpersonal relationships, and other sociopolitical issues. We will also consider how switching the metaphors we use to describe or refer to a concept can influence behavior and create social change.

Talk about health is an inevitable part of life. While we may have reasons to think about health more or less acutely at various moments, we cannot avoid contemplating what we know and believe about what “health” is and why it matters. All health-related interactions are mediated by language, and so language has an important role to play in how health is understood, lived, and practiced by each of us individually, in our communities, by health and medical experts, by research and industry professionals, and by our political leaders. This course provides an overview to the many ways in which language and health intersect from a primarily sociolinguistic/discourse analytic perspective. We will engage with multiple forms of data (e.g., doctor/patient interactions, healthcare and “wellness” advertising, drug facts labels, public health messaging, political and governmental statements) with the goal of understanding how language shapes our experiences of health, as well as how our health-related knowledge schemas and value systems are expressed, shared, and reinforced through language use. Through the semester-long final project, students are encouraged to explore research questions of personal interest and importance to them; the course is designed to be relevant and engaging for anyone wishing to pursue future work in linguistics, communications and journalism, medicine, healthcare and healthcare-related fields, and public policy.

This course explores the intersection between linguistics and law, focusing primarily on the application of linguistic knowledge and methods to the legal process. We will examine language as it is used in a variety of legal settings, including police-civilian encounters (e.g., traffic stops, “consensual” searches, interrogations, confessions); the courtroom (e.g., opening statements; witness examination); in the course of appellate litigation and judicial decision-making (e.g., oral arguments, judicial opinion writing, legal interpretation); and the law classroom. We will also cover the role of linguistics as evidence (e.g., speaker profiling, authorship analysis) and linguists in forensic settings. This course is interdisciplinary in nature and weaves together concepts and methods from not only linguistics, but also anthropology, ethnography of communication, sociology, social psychology, and law, with readings and course materials reflecting a diverse blend of perspectives. That said, emphasis will be placed on discourse analysis methods and their application in legal contexts.

This is a course in the discourse analysis of everyday digital conversational interaction. We will examine the structure and use of language in electronic social media such as texting, Facebook, e-mail, Instagram, gChat, Snapchat, Twitter, online discussion boards, personal blogging, and so on. The class will survey prior research on this topic, and students will conduct original research by gathering and analyzing naturally-occurring discourse in one or more of these media. Students will present the findings of their research in small groups and to the entire class. The goals of the course are 1) to examine and analyze the structure and use of digital social media discourse in everyday interaction and 2) to investigate the ways that communicating via these media accomplishes and affects fundamental social activities such as creating joint understanding, building relationships, and displaying identities. The first half of each class will be devoted to lecture and discussion of the readings. The second half will be devoted to analysis and discussion of student-gathered discourse.

Language is central to migration in many ways. For example, language diversity creates barriers between migrants and non-migrants, degrees of language distance often affect the choice of a future home for migrants, new languages and cultures are brought by migrants to the countries they settle in, differences in language and communication patterns influence the destiny of asylum seekers and migrant workers alike, linguistic preferences deeply influence identity processes. The main objective of the course is to create awareness of how important it is to consider the role of language(s) in relation to migration and settlement and centrally to reflect on how language related issues may create barriers in both concrete procedures related to the insertion of migrants in host societies and the social and psychological processes that accompany it. Central to the course will also be the consideration of possible alternatives to a view of linguistic diversity as a problem. Besides articles and book chapters, students will work with documents and case studies exemplifying issues and possible solutions. The course does not have pre-requisites, although some background in linguistics is desirable. The course is open to undergraduates and graduates and is taught in English.

The study of identity is at the core of many disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, however there is a special link that con-nects language and discourse to identities. Not only does the way people speak reveal a lot about who they are, but it also predomi-nantly through discourse and communication that individuals and communities convey and negotiate their sense of self. Among dis-course genres, narrative has a privileged role in constructing and conveying identities and constitutes one of the main arenas in which such processes are negotiated. This course aims at reflecting on and learning about these connections between discourse and identity, with a particular focus on narrative and storytelling. Topics that will be covered include the various kinds and levels of identities that have been the object of study of discourse, the different approaches that have emerged in discourse studies with regards to the analysis of identities, the particular tools that have been developed to this end in narrative studies and some of the debates that have taken place around these themes. Students will collect and analyze different kinds of narratives in a variety of formats and contexts (includ-ing oral and written narratives, social media and other digital contexts) and the ways in which they are used to construct individual or collective identities such as institutional and political ones. The course presupposes some previous exposure to discourse studies and/or narrative studies so students who have had that exposure will be particularly well equipped to take it. The course is taught in English. The course is also labeled ITAL 444

Narrative has been studied by scholars who work in a range of disciplines, among them literary theory, psychology, folklore, sociology, and linguistics. This course serves as an introduction to the sociolinguistic study of narrative, in particular drawing on the theories and methods of qualitative discourse analysis. Concepts and frameworks from course readings and lectures will be applied to data that you collect -- spontaneous oral narratives told during conversations or informal interviews, as well as retold and written versions of the same oral stories. We will discuss and practice transcription, consider the role of culture in shaping narratives, and investigate prototypical and non-prototypical narrative forms. We will use our class corpus to investigate how linguistic features (e.g., referring terms, tense, constructed dialogue) create a story world; how the story world constructs and reflects meanings, relationships, and identities; and how stories are used to accomplish social action in various contexts.

This course explores the intersection of discourse analysis and human-computer interaction. Drawing on ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and interactional sociolinguistics, we will investigate how insights into human social interaction from these fields can be used to improve our understanding of the ways in which human users engage with technology such as conversational AI (i.e. chatbots and voice assistants), automated vehicles, and the like. In addition to reviewing assigned readings and participating in class discussions, you will engage in self-directed research on relevant topics. This course will culminate in a final empirical research project, in which you will research a topic of your choice and present your findings in an academic paper.

Language varies: within speakers, across speakers, and over time. This course is a theoretical and practical introduction to variationist sociolinguistics, the subfield of linguistics concerned with understanding the relationship between variation and language change and with describing and accounting for variation in terms of the linguistic and social factors which underlie it. What are the objects of study in sociolinguistic research? What kinds of questions can we ask about the relationship between language and society, and how do we go about addressing these quantitatively? We’ll pursue answers to these foundational questions by reading classic and contemporary papers in the field – about old fishermen, Harlem teens, Cajun women, nerd girls, frat guys, New Zealanders with attitudes, Polish migrants in Manchester, and other remarkable language users– and apply what we’ve learned to group and individual projects exploring particular cases of variation.

In this course, we will investigate regional, social, and ethnic language variation in the U.S. We will focus on varieties of English but will also discuss issues related to other languages in the U.S., including language contact; language maintenance, loss and change; and variation within some other major U.S. languages, most notably Spanish. We will examine current varieties and in addition will investigate the history of language and dialect differences in the U.S., as well as possible future changes in the American linguistic landscape. We will also consider the sources and general characteristics of language variation, attitudes toward varieties and variation, as well as issues of linguistic prejudice and profiling. Throughout the course, you will also learn how dialect studies are conducted. Students will have the opportunity to participate directly in the study of American dialects by taking part in one of two research projects directed by the professor: Language and Communication in the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area (LCDC) or Smith Island Voices, a study of dialect variation and change in rural Smith Island, MD.

No other dialect of English has received as much academic and social attention as African American Language. From negative critiques to positive celebration of the dialect, the objective of this course is to provide a survey of African American Language (AAL) from linguistic structure and social application. Topics explored in the course will focus on the following areas: · Features of AAL—vocabulary (lexicon, including slang), pronunciation (phonetics and phonology), grammar (morphology and syntax) · Art—rhetoric, expression, speech events like rappin’ and signifyin’ as well as the Black preaching genre, AAL and its influence in music · History and variation—AAL’s relation to African languages, examination of the creole comparison, earlier examples of African American Language, variation within AAL · Education, Ebonics and other applied issues—issues connected to the use of AAL, attitudes and effects on teachers’ expectations as well as linguistic profiling, and the extent to which AAL affects the learning of Standard English and the acquisition of reading skills, language in the courtroom and politics Each week, we will explore a different topic from the aforementioned areas and apply the theoretical lesson to practical application, including but not limited to ethnographic observation, data collection, data analysis, student presentations and guest lectures from researchers in the field. Students will use data from the Language and Communication in Washington, DC (LCDC) project and the Corpus of Online Regional African American Language (CORAAL).

This course provides students with an overview of the broad field of Forensic Linguistics – namely, linguistic science applied in legal settings. Topics covered include the language of police and suspects (e.g. the language of ‘consensual’ searches, interrogations, confessions, advising of/requesting right to counsel); language crimes (e.g. solicitation, conspiracy, bribery, threats, perjury, plagiarism); and linguistics as evidence (e.g. identifying anonymous authors of documents associated with criminal activity, identifying anonymous voices). We will also discuss the status of linguistic evidence in court and how best to disseminate relevant knowledge about linguistics to law enforcement practitioners, judges, lawyers, juries, etc. The course will incorporate lecture, class discussion, demonstrations and exercises pertaining to language crimes and linguistic evidence, and presentations by practitioners in the field. Students will conduct a term research project and present their results in (1) a final paper suitable for presentation at a professional linguistics or forensic linguistics conference or publication in an appropriate academic journal, and (2) a final presentation to be presented at the end of the term. Students will also be expected to participate actively in class and complete all in-class exercises.

This course is a theoretical and practical introduction to studying the phonetic aspects of sociolinguistic variation and the social significance of phonetic variation. The first part of the course will focus on the acoustic analysis of conversational speech, with attention paid to the particular challenges that arise in dealing with non-citation-form data collected in the field. In the second part of the course, we will turn to the experimental study of speech perception and social factors, and then consider how phonetic change over the lifespan may be studied using both field- and lab-based methodologies. Finally, we will discuss the implications of sociophonetic variation for phonological theory. Students will develop skills throughout this course that will enable them to make appropriate methodological choices when planning research projects in sociophonetics, to use tools such as ELAN, PRAAT, FAVE, and NORM to facilitate data processing, and to critically evaluate (socio)phonetic studies of language.

This course examines the interplay between language and education in schooling environments around the world. Drawing on a variety of sociolinguistic approaches, we will consider how language becomes a resource for (re)producing and transforming dominant social norms, values, and identities in school-based interactions, curricular materials, and education policies across cultures. In addition to reviewing assigned readings and participating in class discussions, you will take part in hands-on analyses of educational discourse and engage in self-directed research on topics related to language and education.

In this course, we explore the complex relationships between language, gender, and sexuality, integrating theory and analytical perspectives from sociolinguistics and gender theory. Through readings, lectures, full-class and small group discussions, and hands-on data workshops, we will cover topics such as: gender as socially constructed through language use; gender differences in language use and interaction (e.g., turn-taking and interrupting in conversation, gossip, humor, narrative, conflict); sexism and heterosexism in language; sexual orientation and language; representations of gender and gendered language use in the media; and language and gender in institutional contexts (school, family, work, law). Students also carry out original research on a topic of their choice, culminating in a final paper and class presentation.

Systems of communication that come naturally to humans are thoroughly unnatural for computers. For truly robust information technologies, we need to teach computers to unpack our language. Natural language processing (NLP) technologies facilitate semi-intelligent artificial processing of human language text. In particular, techniques for analyzing the grammar and meaning of words and sentences can be used as components within applications such as web search, question answering, and machine translation. This course introduces fundamental NLP concepts and algorithms, emphasizing the marriage of linguistic corpus resources with statistical and machine learning methods. As such, the course combines elements of linguistics, computer science, and data science. Coursework will consist of lectures, programming assignments (in Python), and a final team project. The course is intended for students who are already comfortable with programming and have some familiarity with probability theory. Linguistics students are recommended to complete Intro to NLP (LING-362) before enrolling in this course.

This is an interdisciplinary course on the psychology of language (psycholinguistics) designed to introduce students to the important issues, ideas, and scientific research in this field. We will cover the cognitive processes of speech perception, word recognition, sentence processing, language production, and language acquisition, across language modalities (signed and spoken) and in a range of populations (e.g. healthy adults and children; multilinguals; and individuals with brain damage). We will explore a range of perspectives on these issues by reading and discussing research papers from psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive science, and computer science. To allow students to engage with all of these perspectives, the course will provide background on relevant research methods (e.g. eyetracking, brain imaging, artificial language learning) as well as practical training on how to read and understand scientific papers in an unfamiliar field. Prerequisites: Prior coursework in linguistics, psychology, or cognitive science; or permission of instructor.

In the past few years, the advent of abundant computing power and data has catapulted machine learning to the forefront of a number of fields of research, including Linguistics and especially Natural Language Processing. At the same time, general machine learning toolkits and tutorials make handling ‘default cases’ relatively easy, but are much less useful in handling non-standard data, less studied languages, low-resource scenarios and the need for interpretability that is essential for drawing robust inferences from data. This course gives a broad overview of the machine learning techniques most used for text processing and linguistic research. The course is taught in Python, covering both general statistical ML algorithms, such as linear models, decision trees and ensembles, and current deep learning models, such as deep neural net classifiers, recurrent networks, transformers, sequence to sequence LLMs and contextualized continuous meaning representations. The course assumes good command of Python (ability to implement a program from pseudo-code) but does not require previous experience with machine learning.

LING 6030 is a professional development course for graduate students in linguistics programs. The course goals are: 1) to prepare Masters and PhD students to use their linguistics training in a variety of professional contexts; 2) to foster productive job-seeking and professional development practices that will serve participants beyond their degree program and throughout their working lives; and 3) to cultivate effective networking and self-presentation skills.

In this course, you will design materials for your professional self-presentation, as well as develop individual professional portfolios. You will broaden your network in career areas of interest and conduct research on the role of linguistics in professional practice. The class will be a mixture of lecture, discussions, workshops, and activity-based interaction. We will develop our understanding of professional applications of all areas of linguistics through readings, discussions, and presentations.

Course Objectives: To cultivate a professional presence, which will be reflected in materials like resumes, cover letters, LinkedIn profile, elevator pitches, definitions of key terms of the discipline, and a draft professional portfolio that displays your projects and accomplishments. Participants will create a final analytical project and develop a presentation highlighting their research into their chosen workplace settings, institutions, and career paths, demonstrating where the skills and training of a linguist fit and are of value.

This is the second half of an introduction to the graduate/senior level phonology. In Phonology 1 or in Sounds of language, we have seen various phonological phenomena. The focus was mainly on descriptive phonology. In this course, we will focus on formalization of phonological data. Within the Optimality Theory (OT), which is currently the predominant theory in the field, we will analyze phonological data. Topics to discuss include metrical theories, correspondence theories, morphology-phonology interactions, and variations in phonology, all of which are relatively less seriously discussed in Phonology 1 and in Sounds of language. Some important topics to discuss include the following; (a) Rule vs. constraint (vs. parameter) (b) Parallelism vs. serialism (c) Variations, exceptions, optionality, gradiency, frequency, probability in phonology (d) Lexicon: morpheme-based vs. word-based

The verb seems to guide both the building of structure and the semantic composition of the sentence. We see this, for example, in the fact that the verb is responsible for the transitivity of the sentence (whether it contains a direct object or not) and in the fact that the semantic roles of subjects and objects are determined by the verb. And yet, recent work has questioned whether it is the verb itself that takes on these roles, or the structure which surrounds the verb. In this seminar, we will discuss a variety of topics in the syntax and semantics of the verb that have been important in recent debates, including argument association, aspectual composition, adverbial modification, transitivity, and complementation patterns. The two instructors bring different expertise to the course: Alison Biggs is a syntactician who researches argument structure and morphosyntactic structure, among other topics; Paul Portner is a formal semanticist who has recently focused on mood, modality, the syntactic representation and discourse participants. We will pursue our investigation of each topic in an integrated way, as we master the relevant literature in formal semantics and syntax and use the tools of each field to enrich and make precise the ideas which have been developed in the other.

This course is an advanced graduate seminar in phonology that examines the ways in which tone, a phonological phenomenon, serves a morphological or syntactic function across languages, referred to as grammatical or melodic tone. We will discuss typological issues in grammatical tone relating to their properties, and where grammatical tone is found cross-linguistically, but our focus will be on African and Mesoamerican languages. We will also discuss methodological approaches to analyzing grammatical tone such as floating autosegmental tones, tonal rules or tonal construction schemas and how grammatical tone interacts with phonological rules and morphosyntactic derivations. The class will also investigate how grammatical tones incorporate tonal and intonational properties. Some of the questions we will explore include: (i) what is the range of variation documented to date in grammatical tone systems? (ii) what kind of phenomena motivate different types of analyses? (iii) what kinds of predictions are made within each type of analytical approach? (iv) what is the relationship (if any) between types of grammatical tone patterns and other aspects of individual languages' prosodic systems (e.g., size of tonal inventory, distribution of tones, etc.)? Students who enroll in the seminar will be encouraged to consider previously unanalyzed data in developing novel analyses.

This course is an introduction to experimental research in syntax and semantics. The course will review major experimental methodologies used to investigate syntactic and semantic research questions including brain-imaging techniques, artificial-grammar learning, and large-scale grammaticality judgment tasks. Students will also read classic and contemporary papers using these methods and they will practice identifying novel research questions and designing potential future experiments.

This course is a continuation of Syntax I. It provides an advanced survey of topics in contemporary syntactic theory through readings from the primary literature and offers training in syntactic argumentation. Key topics which will frame our discussion include phrase structure, argument structure, case and agreement, passives, raising and control, binding, the A-/Ā-distinction, cyclicity, locality, minimality, and ellipsis.

Building on the foundation of Semantics and Pragmatics 1, this course covers a variety of topics and aims to help students transition into working with original, current research in the field. The specific topics chosen each year vary (and may be adjusted depending on student interest), but include such issues as tense and aspect, mood and modality, intensional verbs, Gricean and neo-Gricean pragmatics, theories of presupposition, and speech acts.

Topics in semantics focusing on Spanish, including negation, tense and aspect, and the subjunctive.

In the past thirty years of syntactic research, much attention has been paid to the main theoretical questions, and key empirical phenomena, that straddle the boundary between morphology and syntax. This course is an in-depth look at the highly influential Agree relation (Chomsky 2000, 2001), exploring the many ways it has been defined in recent (morpho)syntactic literature and investigating how its different versions fit onto specific syntactic agreement phenomena. We contrast two fundamental positions: a classic view in which Agree is central to displacement phenomena and a more radical view which limits Agree to agreement phenomena more narrowly. To this end, we will deconstruct the key components of the Agree relation including directionality, minimality, locality, the featural structure of probes and goals, and (non-)obligatoriness, among other topics. We will also try to determine the empirical range of Agree by taking a close look at less canonical instances of agreement including anti-agreement, wh-agreement, cliticization, non-phi-based agreement in general, and DP-internal agreement. Throughout, the emphasis will be on examining a maximally broad set of cross-linguistic data, with the goal of drawing wide-ranging empirical generalizations about agreement and movement patterns. The overarching aim is to distill the key insights from the very rich literature on Agree in order to nail down its proper place in the grammar (tied to movement phenomena or not) and in the treatment of morphosyntactic agreement phenomena in natural language.

In the last decade, there has been a tremendous and welcome expansion of research in the psycholinguistics, acquisition, and neurolinguistics of semantics and pragmatics. In this course, we will learn about four very active such topics: 1. Processing Presuppositions 2. Acquiring Adjectives 3. Learning the Lexicon 4. Interpreting Implicatures In each section, we will first review the basic background on each range of phenomena, and then delve into the experimental literature with the goal of both understanding the methodologies being used and evaluating the importance of the findings for semantics/pragmatics, on the one hand, and for the theory of language processing or acquisition, on the other. Interested students will have an opportunity to design and run their own studies as part of the course, but students may also complete the course with only written assignments. Students should have taken at least one Semantics/Pragmatics course (such as LING/SPAN 531). We welcome participation from students in any relevant area, including the following: cognitive science, formal semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, applied linguistics, and psychology. Requirements: 1.Regular reading and active participation 2.Presentations of target articles 3.Short papers (approx. 5 page) at several points during the semester 4.Term paper a.Students signing up for 538: 10-15 page paper. b.Students signing up for 738: either a longer paper or an experimental project Possible Readings Processing Presuppositions Chemla, Emmanuel. 2009. Presuppositions of quantified sentences: experimental data. Natural Language Semantics 17(4):299–340. doi:\bibinfo{doi}{10.1007/s11050-009-9043-9}. URL http://www. springerlink.com/content/xw182722l66v7100/. Chemla, Emmanuel and Lewis Bott. 2013. Processing presuppositions: Dynamic semantics vs pragmatic enrichment. Language and Cognitive Processes 38(3):241–260. Chemla, Emmanuel and Philippe Schlenker. 2012. Incremental vs. symmetric accounts of presupposition projection: an experimental approach. Natural Language Semantics 20(2):177–226. doi:\bibinfo{doi} {10.1007/s11050-012-9080-7}. URL http://www.springerlink.com/content/x1830j0872140612/ abstract/. Romoli, J., Sudo, Y. and Snedeker, J. (2012). An Experimental Investigation of Presupposition Projection in Conditional Sentences. In Neil Ashton, Anca Chereches, and David Lutz (eds.) Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 21. Romoli, J., Khan, M., Sudo, Y., & Snedeker, J. (2015). Solving temporary referential ambiguity using presupposed content. In Schwarz, F. (Ed.),Experimental Perspectives on Presuppositions (pp. 67-87). Springer International Publishing. Schwarz, F. 2007. Processing presupposed content. Journal of Semantics 24(4):373–416. Acquiring Adjectives Barner, D. & Snedeker, J. (2008). Compositionality and statistics in adjective acquisition: 4-year olds interpret tall and short based on the size distributions of novel noun referents. Child Development, 79(3), 594-608. Syrett, K., Kennedy, C., & Lidz, J. (2010). Meaning and context in children’s understanding of gradable adjectives. Journal of Semantics, 27(1), 1-35. Syrett, K., Bradley, E., Kennedy, C., & Lidz, J. (2006). Shifting standards: Children’s understanding of gradable adjectives. In K. Ud Deen, J. Nomura, B. Schulz, & B. D. Schwartz (Eds.), Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition - North America (GALANA), Honolulu, HI (pp. 353-364). Cambridge, Mass: UConn Occasional Papers in Linguistics 4. Learning the Lexicon Barner, D., Wagner, L. & Snedeker, J. (2008). Events and the ontology of individuals: Verbs as a source of individuating nouns. Cognition, 106(2), 1-6. Hartshorne, J. K., Pogue, A., & Snedeker, J. (2015). Love is hard to underst and: The relationship between transitivity and caused events in the acquisition of emotion verbs. To appear in Journal of Child Language. Hartshorne, J. K., & Snedeker, J. (2012) Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics. Language and Cognitive Processes, 1-35. Papafragou, A., Fairchild, S., Cohen, M., & Friedberg, C. (in press). Learning words from speakers with false beliefs. Journal of Child Language. Landau, B., Johannes, K., Skordos, D., & Papafragou, A. (2016). Containment and support: Core and complexity in spatial language learning. Cognitive Science. (e-pub before printed version) Bunger, A., Skordos, D., Trueswell, J., & Papafragou, A. (2016). How adults and children encode causative events cross-linguistically: Implications for language production and attention. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. (e-pub before printed version) Interpreting Implicatures Barner, D., Chow, K., & Yang, S. J. (2009). Finding one’s meaning: A test of the relation between quantifiers and integers in language development. Cognitive Psychology, 58, 195–219. Hartshorne, J. K., Snedeker, J., Liem Azar, S. Y. M., & Kim, A. E. (2015). The neural computation of scalar implicature, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 30(5), 620-634. DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2014.981195 Huang, Y. & Snedeker, J. (2011). Logic and conversation revisited: Evidence for a division between semantic and pragmatic content in real-time language comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26(8), 1161-1172. Noveck, I. A., & Sperber, D. (2007). The why and how of experimental pragmatics: The case of ‘scalar inferences’. In N. Burton-Roberts (Ed.), Advances in pragmatics. Palgrave: Basingstoke. Papafragou, A., & Musolino, J. (2003). Scalar implicatures: Experiments at the semantics pragmatics interface. Cognition, 86, 253–282. Schulze, C., Grassmann, S., & Tomasello, M. (2013). 3-year-old children make relevance inferences in indirect verbal communication. Child development, 84 (6), 2079–2093. Skordos, D., & Papafragou, A. (2016). Children’s derivation of scalar implicatures: alternatives and relevance. Cognition. 153: 6-18. Verbuk, A., & Shultz, T. (2010). Acquisition of relevance implicatures: A case against a rationality-based account of conversational implicatures. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 2297–2313. de Villiers, P. A., de Villiers, J., Coles-White, D. J., & Carpenter, L. (2009). Acquisition of relevance implicatures in typically-developing children and children with autism. In J. Chandlee, M. Franchini, S. Lord, & G. M. Rheiner (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33th annual boston university conference on language development (pp. 121–132). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Sentences of the form 'if A then B' ('Conditionals') are anything but rare and play an important role in language. Their meaning raises some interesting questions, however. Some that will be discussed in this class are: How can we actually have judgments about the meaning and veracity of conditionals when they are often about hypothetical, sometimes even counterfactual situations? What instances of A are relevant when we interpret B and which do we safely set aside? How do conditionals behave in different environments, e.g. under negation? And, finally, how come 'if A then B' is often to taken to mean 'if A then B' and 'If not A then not B'. Prerequisite for this class is Semantics and Pragmatics 1 or equivalent.

This course provides an introduction to language acquisition from the perspective of how we might account for the kind of complex linguistic knowledge a child learner comes to attain, and how that account is both informed by and contributes to linguistic theory. We examine the notion of ‘Universal Grammar’ and how it has evolved over the past several decades, including the historical context in which it arose (e.g., as a response to the prevailing behavioristic learning model of the first half of the 20th century). Topics to be covered include: issues of learnability (including a hypothesized ‘poverty of the stimulus’ and the role of negative evidence in language development); how much is learned from limited input; the hypothesized role of ‘parameters’ in language learning (including acquisition studies of specific parameters and more general questions concerning the evolution and validity of parameter theory for language acquisition); the acquisition of morphosyntactic functional categories and features; and the extent to which knowledge of language at earlier stages of language development is of the same type or ‘continuous’ with the kind of knowledge mature native speakers possess. There will be some emphasis on close reading and critical analysis of primary-source literature (i.e., actual acquisition studies) so that students will have an opportunity to become more familiar with some of the design and experimental methods employed in language acquisition research. Prerequisite: A course in generative syntax.

"The word in language is half someone else's…[I]t exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own." Bakhtin “All languaging is..taking old language and pushing it into new contexts.” “Social groups seem to be bound primarily by a shared repertoire of prior texts.” Becker Intertextuality is a notion that has become widely used as a theoretical framework within the field of literary criticism since it was first named as such by Kristeva (1974), drawing on Bakhtin (1965, 1973, see also 1981). Over the past twenty years or so, linguists have joined scholars in anthropology, the visual arts and music in their fascination with intertextuality; prior texts are seen to be important to general linguistic theory as well as to an understanding of textual meaning and the discursive construction of identity, master narratives, and ideology. But the theoretical approaches and the types of texts used in these fields are often so different as to make one believe that any similarity begins and ends with the label ‘intertextuality’. It is the aim of this course to attempt to bridge the chasm at the intersection of these disciplinary approaches as we attempt to move the notion of ‘intertextuality’ from that of a multidisciplinary nature (i.e., of interest to different disciplines) to that of an interdisciplinary nature (i.e., drawing on and synthesizing the analyses of different disciplines). After becoming familiar with foundational works on intertextuality, students will collect spoken and/or written texts and use these to ground their emerging understanding of intertextuality. As we begin to operationalize the notion of intertextuality, we will grapple with a variety of issues due, in part, to disciplinary differences across the fields of linguistics, anthropology, literary criticism, and the arts. Three of the most critical issues to be addressed early will be 1) the definition of ‘text’ and, subsequently, of ‘intertextuality’; 2) the problematization of the notion of ‘author/speaker’; and 3) the role of ‘author/speaker’ meaning and intentionality within intertextual studies. In previous semesters of this course, students have investigated the interconnections that exist across spoken, written, and visual texts (both public and private discourse) as well as the ways in which people use these interconnections to do things in the world. Their projects have examined the linguistic construction of identity in family discourse and in personal blogs, the construction of autism within personal and institutional webpages, the intertextual origins of public opinion in published media, the role of master narratives related to pregnancy within pregnancy magazines, how meaning is accomplished in Japanese tanka poetry, the construction of racism in everyday narratives, and the achievement of humor in a variety of contexts, including improvisational theater, children’s animated films, television shows and comic strips.

Have you studied abroad and want to process and share your experiences? Are you considering studying abroad, but would like to know more about languages, cultures and expectations? Are you wondering how you can build on a study abroad experience for your future career? This new course offered in the Department of linguistics will allow students to explore these questions while deepening their understanding of the connections between study abroad, and learning about foreign languages and cultures: • Foundations of Study Abroad • When did students begin to study abroad and why? History, background and context of study abroad. What factors are helpful to consider when choosing/reflecting on a study abroad experience? • Study Abroad for Language Learning • Expectations and reality of language learning outcomes. How to get the most out of linguistic opportunities and interactions abroad. • Cross-Cultural Communication in Study Abroad Contexts • Cross-cultural differences and problems that can arise, how to recognize and address issues including encountering new dialects (British English, for example), and how language, gender, power and politics can interact during a study abroad. • Issues of bicultural understanding, acquisition and development • Educational implications • Using study abroad to collect data (interviews, photos, archival work) for a senior thesis or final paper. Short-term summer program to and preparation for full semesters abroad. Setting realistic but ambitious goals for language and culture learning. • How to use a study abroad experience for your career preparation, for graduate programs, or to find research opportunities. • Discussion of the implications of study abroad for the Georgetown community and beyond. This exciting new course welcomes students who plan to study abroad in the future as well as students who have already studied abroad and would like to process, share and expound on their experiences. Students enrolled in this course will present a final project on a study abroad region and topic of their choice (involving a new culture, a foreign language, or both).

In this course, students will explore research methods from an interpretivist epistemological perspective and carry out a research project using this approach. The course will begin with an introduction to positivism. Positivism is the name critics have given to the “common sense” epistemology that is dominant within linguistics and language studies. This epistemology asserts, among other things, that research should be objective, neutral, or apolitical. Students will explore conceptual and ethical critiques of positivistic research. After reading and discussing critiques of positivism, the course will introduce students to alternative epistemologies that have long traditions both in language studies and in other related areas of scholarship. Students will engage with methodological approaches from well-established interpretivist paradigms such as feminist, queer, critical race, and/or critical disability scholarship. They will then explore how interpretivist scholars collect and analyze qualitative data using three techniques: interviewing, participant observation, and document analysis. Students will learn to undertake interviewing, participant observation, and document analysis from an interpretivist perspective. Finally, students will explore the way interpretivist scholars write about research, comparing it with the textual practices of positivistic scholarship. They will write up a report of their own interpretivist research project and workshop it with peers and the instructor.

LING-450 introduces central concepts of and tools to be used in second/foreign language testing. The course explores issues of ethics, the theoretical foundations of language assessment including reliability, validity arguments, impact and washback, as well as the technical and practical aspects of developing language tests for different uses and purposes. Students will apply concepts via hands-on course projects, which will involve reviewing an existing language test, discussing a current issue in language testing, developing and critiquing items and completing a final project in test design. Active participation in discussing the readings and relating them to language acquisition, policy and sociolinguistics is critical to the course. Students will also relate current events to the concepts discussed. structured in a lecture/discussion format. Learning Goals To become familiar with current language testing theory and practice. To understand the multi-faceted, iterative, and overlapping process of assessment; To develop skills in writing, revising, and analyzing results of classroom tests; To review and critique existing assessment instruments; To understand how to select tests for particular purposes and situations; To evaluate research in which language testing plays a part. To develop a test framework

This course introduces basic design, measurement, analysis, and inference procedures used in applied linguistics quantitative research, with an emphasis on understanding and using statistics and on developing foundational skills with computerized statistical tools. More broadly, the course addresses a range of topics critical to the accurate and ethical use of quantitative methods in language studies, including: (a) the purposes and roles of research; (b) literature review and the generation of research questions; (c) study design strategies for gathering, organizing, and analyzing quantitative data; (d) the importance of accuracy (and error) in developing and using measures and other data elicitation procedures; (e) critical reading of research reports; and (f) current concerns with the use of statistical significance testing, the role to be played by power analysis, effect sizes, and confidence intervals, and the nature of ‘scientific research’. Statistical techniques covered in this course include a variety of applications within the following broad categories: • description • correlation and prediction • comparison of means • comparison of frequencies • effect sizes and confidence intervals This list appears deceptively brief and simple—the accurate and effective use of related techniques requires understanding and careful planning. Therefore, the course addresses statistics from three perspectives: principles (logic and use), practice (how to calculate and interpret), and presentation (how to display and report). For each technique, the use of computerized tools is demonstrated, and students are afforded practice opportunities through analytic exercises.

In this course, we will investigate how language shapes and is shaped by society. We will address various levels of social organization (from nation to neighborhood to individual) as well as many levels of language organization (from phoneme to conversation to entire languages). Through course readings, lectures, group discussions, hands-on data analysis, presentations by invited guest speakers, and other media, we will cover topics such as societal multilingualism, language planning and policy. We will examine the structured nature of language variation among and across different social groups (e.g. gender, race, ethnicity, social class), and will discuss the relationship between variation and language change over time. We will also investigate language attitudes and stereotypes, speakers’ linguistic style and language performance. We will discuss ethnographic methods of studying the intersection of culture and discourse. Finally, we will consider the applications of sociolinguistics to various professional fields, including education, law, and medicine.

This course will provide you with hands-on experience with methods for collecting data on language in its social context, for example, participant observation, sociolinguistic interviews, surveys, subjective reaction tests. You will learn about different methods in the context of a sociolinguistic study of a nearby community in which you will participate during the course of the semester. For example, students may participate in the Language and Communication in the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area (LCDC) or Smith Island Voices, a study of dialect variation and change in rural Smith Island, MD. In addition, we will analyze short problems that can be addressed through the data. General topics related to the methods will be addressed, e.g. objectivity/subjectivity; community involvement; recording, managing, and transcribing data; strengths, weaknesses, and purposes of various approaches. Course Goals: The overall goals of the course include the following: • Develop competence in the range of methods used to collect and analyze data in different areas of sociolinguistics • Develop skills in observing, recording, and transcribing language in its social setting • Review some major sociolinguistic field projects; design and conduct a small-scale community-based project in the local area that will connect to our larger departmental project, Language and Communication in the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Area (LCDC), or with the Smith Island Voices project. • Be able to evaluate others’ research from a methodological standpoint • Evaluate the appropriateness (and interdependence) of quantitative and qualitative methods • Understand the interdependence of theory and method • Examine the relationship between researchers and those who provide data • Gain confidence in designing and conducting research projects At the beginning of the semester, we will work as a class to identify several local communities of interest for sociolinguistic study. Working in teams, each of you will conduct a series of Field Projects in the community context. These projects will culminate in a final Mini Sociolinguistic Analysis of some aspect of the community of study. As you work, each individual will keep a Fieldwork Journal, to be submitted at the end of the semester. Following is more detail about the various course assignments:

This course introduces, and provides practice trying out, a variety of types of microanalysis of conversational discourse. While the focus is interactional sociolinguistics, other related approaches are also introduced. Topics include conversational involvement; conversational style; intertextuality; coherence in discourse; transcription theory and practice; theories of framing, positioning, and stance; listenership; the poetic aspects of conversation; power and solidarity in interaction; knowledge in interaction, and identity construction. Through studying these topics and applying theoretical concepts to data, you will learn how to do and write up discourse analytic research. With doctoral students in mind, the course focuses on training to write publishable academic papers. Other graduate students with appropriate backgrounds are welcome.

Intercultural communication incorporates critical reading of academic and general audience publications on the trans-disciplinary field of intercultural communication; collecting and analyzing instances of “intercultural communication”, and applied simulation activities of the type used in professional development training in private industry. Term projects are geared towards an academic deliverable (a research paper) or a professional deliverable (a “practitioner’s project”). In this class, you will 1) Engage in the critical examination of what “culture” means when it is co-produced in interaction as an explanation for human behavior, 2) Explore situated intercultural discourse in interactional contexts such as workplaces, classrooms, courtrooms and institutional gatekeeping encounters, 3) Examine relationships between language use and various social identities, including race, ethnicity and gender from an intersectional perspective, and 4) Wrestle with how we can apply research-based findings in interdiscourse communication to “improve” everyday interactions as well as to address and redress social inequality. Our primary theoretical framework is interactional sociolinguistics with a focus on qualitative discourse analysis and ethnographic field methods. You’ll have the opportunity to record and analyze interactional data throughout the course and to analyze data brought in by your facilitator and colleagues. In additionl to readings in interactional sociolinguistics, we will read research theoretically grounded in linguistic anthropology, communication, raciolinguistics and educational linguistics. We will focus on how features of conversational interaction (such turn-taking, silence, indirectness) vary across groups of people; how (mis)communication occurs, how social inequality can be reproduced; the intersectional nature of identity; face systems, conversational style, and conversational inferencing. The course also focuses on the practical applications of intercultural communication, such as in private industry organizations and government, bringing in the facilitator’s experience as a consultant and intercultural trainer for large organizations. Simulation activities and role plays used in organizational training and development will be enacted and analyzed from a critical perspective.

This course explores how interactants integrate an array of visual and auditory resources, including gestures, facial expressions, physical materials, space, images, and sounds, to pursue social actions. We will survey multimodal research on video-recorded interactions in a variety of settings (e.g., casual gatherings, service encounters, health care, education, entertainment, etc.). Through this process, we will build skills for collecting, transcribing, editing, analyzing, and presenting multimodal data. In addition to taking part in reading discussions, analyses, and data sessions, students will conduct independent projects on multimodal interaction based on their own or publicly available data.

This course is designed to offer a general overview of the most pertinent issues of diversity in schooling through a discourse analytic lens. Aside from introducing classical approaches to analyzing diversity in education, the course examines the nature of classroom interaction and student identity construction, issues in and approaches to scaffolding learning among minoritized student populations, and the reinforcement of and resistance to dominant ideologies and social structures as they arise in the classroom. We will explore how differences in language, culture, race, ethnicity, gender, and ability are enacted and discussed in classrooms in the U.S. and abroad, with the goal of developing a deeper understanding of the issues teachers and students face in diverse educational contexts. In addition to taking part in reading discussions, video-based analysis, and data sessions, students will conduct independent projects on issues of diversity as they arise in classroom interaction. Students will be able to use their own data or data provided by the instructor for their projects.

This course focuses on discourse analytic approaches to the study of inclusion and exclusion in social interaction. We will explore how people engage in (tacitly) inclusive and exclusionary practices in relation to race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, etc. We will review classic and current research on inclusion/exclusion across contexts (e.g., casual interaction, education, media, etc.) and within a range of discourse analytic frameworks (conversation analysis, membership categorization analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, discursive psychology, and critical discourse analysis). In addition to taking part in reading discussions and data sessions, each student will design and carry out their own study on inclusion/exclusion in interaction using their own data or data from archived sources.

This course investigates the relationship between discourse and power in a variety of institutions, including legal, medical, political, corporate, and educational. Drawing on microanalytic frameworks of conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics, we will explore the discursive re-production and transformation of institutional power (a)symmetries, norms, and objectives. In this process, we will consider the practical problems and solutions for (re)negotiating institutional power (a)symmetries, and we will reflect on key methodological issues, analytical procedures, and ethical concerns in examining institutional discourse and power. In addition to taking part in reading discussions and data sessions, you will design and carry out an independent microanalytic study of discourse and power in an institutional context of your choice. You will have the option of forming your study as an academic paper or a training video for institutional stakeholders.

Prerequisite: Prior experience with discourse analysis or permission of instructor.

This course offers preparation for students interested in undertaking cross-disciplinary research that draws on theories and methods of discourse analysis. Such research offers exciting opportunities to examine discourse phenomena as they emerge in a wide range of professional contexts including technology, medicine, education, law, and business; to investigate the role of language in the relationship between ideology and practice; and to apply knowledge of language and social interaction to address important societal problems. The course will involve all key phases of cross-disciplinary collaboration, from making the case for discourse analysis in diverse professional contexts, developing appropriate research questions and project design, collecting and analyzing language data, to reporting research findings to different audiences. Throughout the semester, we will discuss the challenges and rewards of bringing discourse analysis into cross-disciplinary projects, drawing on the experiences of guest lecturers, my own research, and the emerging experiences of students in the course. Students will be expected to apply their learnings from the course to projects tailored to their interest areas and experience levels. Students will collect and analyze data relevant to their areas of interest, with the aim of producing a final project that they will be able to use to further their exploration of cross-disciplinary research (e.g. professional portfolio, conference presentation, etc.).

Though well over half the world’s languages are tonal (using differences in pitch in order to signal lexical or inflectional contrasts between words), and though the study of tone has played an important role in the historical development of phonological theory, tone remains a relatively under-studied topic in modern phonology. This is a real shame, since tonal phenomena present problems that are as interesting, as challenging, and as beautiful as any others in phonology. In this course, we’ll take a look at some of these problems, and consider what they can teach us about modern phonological theory. The course will proceed in two parallel threads. On the one hand, we’ll be looking at particular tonal phenomena from a broad typological perspective. For example, we’ll consider processes such as tone spreading (e.g. ??? ? ????) and tone shift (??? ? ???) in a wide variety of languages, and we’ll try to arrive at general answers to questions like • What motivates tone spread and shift, and what is the synchronic relationship between the two (if any?) • Why do tones sometimes spread/shift in a bounded domain (within two or three syllables) while others spread/ shift unboundedly over any number of syllables? • What positions within a word attract (or repel) spreading or shifting tones? • What factors act to block spread/shift? • In languages where spread/shift is asymmetrical (e.g. where a H tone spreads or shifts but L does not), what is the source of this asymmetry? Some other topics that we’ll consider from a broad typological perspective include the representation of tonal contrasts, the potentially variable representation of contour tones, the relationship between tone and segmental properties (especially the laryngeal properties of consonants), and tonal assimilation and dissimilation. On the other hand, we’ll be looking closely at a wide range of individual languages (e.g. Mazatec, Akan, Hausa, Zulu, Kikuyu, Thai, Cantonese) to see how different tonal processes interact with one another within them, and how our grammar must be structured in order to adequately account for these interactions. We’ll pay particularly close attention to real and apparent instances of tonal opacity, which intuitively seem to require elaborate multi-stage derivations. These cases are abundant within tonal phonology, and are one of the main reasons why phonologists working on tone have been reluctant to adopt surface-based theories of phonology like Optimality Theory. There’s no consensus opinion right now on how these cases should be handled – we’ll seek to arrive at our own consensus over the course of the semester.

This is a certificate course designed for Linguistics graduate students interested in complementing their research skills with good teaching practice. Good teaching is not a mystery, but a learnable skill and a rewarding intellectual endeavor. The course will meet on the second, third and fourth Tuesday of each month throughout the fall and spring semesters to explore topics in teaching and learning. In addition, students will participate in at least one workshop offered by the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship in each semester. In addition to investigating best practices of well-known classroom strategies, such as lecturing, leading discussions, designing assignments and group projects, and assessment, we will discuss such questions as “What does learner-centered teaching in Linguistics look like?” and “How do learning styles affect the Linguistics classroom?” We will also discuss collaborative learning, different kinds and uses of assessment, and the use of technology in the classroom. In the fall, participants will observe at least two linguistics classes (a graduate class, in which they may be enrolled, and an undergraduate class), and report on and discuss what they observe. Participants will also have a frank discussion with current and former TAs and graduate student Instructors about teaching in the Linguistics Department at Georgetown. Each participant will develop a lesson plan and related homework assignment. In the spring, each participant will develop a syllabus for a course of his/her own choosing and a statement of personal teaching philosophy. Each participant will present a teaching demonstration based upon his/her lesson plan; where possible, this demo class will be as a guest instructor in a real course. Demonstration classes will be videotaped, and each participant will receive his/her own videofile. Many colleges and universities want evidence of teaching training when hiring new faculty. The work products from this course can be included in a teaching portfolio (which is valuable in the academic job search). Participants who complete the course and all assignments will also receive a certificate attesting to their training. Students wishing to enroll in the Linguistics Teaching Practicum should register for or add LING 501 in the fall semester, and LING 502 in the spring semester. Tuition is not charged for this course. The workload of the Linguistics Teaching Practicum is targeted to be less than half that of a regular graduate Linguistics course, so that students can take this course in addition to a full courseload. (Students with fellowships may count 2.5 hours per week for this course toward their departmental TA/RA obligations.) Note: PhD students who have been awarded fellowships are required to take the Linguistics Teaching Practicum in their first year of study, in preparation for their TA/Instructor assignments. However, all PhD students are encouraged to enroll at some point in their course of study.

This course is designed for Linguistics graduate students interested in complementing their research skills with good teaching practice. Good teaching is not a mystery, but a learnable skill and a rewarding intellectual endeavor. The course will meet three Tuesdays each month throughout the fall and spring semesters to explore topics in teaching and learning. PhD students who have been awarded fellowships are required to take the Linguistics Teaching Practicum in their first year of study, in preparation for their TA/Instructor assignments. However, all PhD students are encouraged to enroll at some point in their course of study, to develop their pedagogical skills. In addition to investigating best practices of well-known classroom strategies, such as developing lesson plans, lecturing, leading discussions, and designing group projects, we will discuss such questions as “What does learner-centered teaching in Linguistics look like?” and “How do learning styles affect the Linguistics classroom?” We will also discuss collaborative learning, different kinds and uses of assessment, and the use of technology in the classroom. In the fall, participants will observe two linguistics classes (a graduate class, in which they may be enrolled, and an undergraduate class), and report on and discuss what they observe. Participants will also have a frank discussion with current and former graduate student TAs and Instructors about teaching in the Linguistics Department at Georgetown. Each participant will develop a lesson plan and related homework assignment. In the spring, each participant will develop a syllabus for a course of his/her own choosing and a statement of personal teaching philosophy. Each participant will present a teaching demonstration based upon his/her lesson plan; where possible, this demo class will be as a guest instructor in a real course. Participants will videotape themselves, and may discuss their videotape with the instructor. Many colleges and universities want evidence of pedagogical training when hiring new faculty. The work products from this course can be included in a teaching portfolio (which is valuable in the academic job search). Students wishing to enroll in the Linguistics Teaching Practicum should register for or add LING 501 in the fall semester, and LING 502 in the spring semester. Tuition is not charged for this course. The workload of the Linguistics Teaching Practicum is targeted to be less than half that of a regular graduate Linguistics course, so that students can take this course in addition to a full courseload. (Students with fellowships may count 2.5 hours per week for this course toward their departmental TA/RA obligations.)

Grammar, phonology, and reading. Selections from Sanskrit literature.

Language Development in Immersive Contexts Abroad Recent approaches to SLA, including neurocognitive approaches, suggest that only ‘immersion-like’ conditions lead to an electrophysiological signature typical of native speakers. However, contrary to expectations, SA research often finds minimal or no effects of immersion experience on linguistic development. Traditionally, studies have compared SA vs L2 classroom contexts and have focused on fluency and lexical and grammatical development. The last decade however has seen significant growth in the number of publications with more diverse populations and programs and more robust research designs. Of special interest to us in this course are the multiple interactions among internal and external factors that work together or against each other to affect L2 development in immersive contexts. The following will receive special attention: 1. context: study vs stay abroad; program characteristics; living arrangements; 2. individual differences: general cognition; aptitude, memory; motivation, anxiety; attitudes, identity; 3. targets: how is language development operationalized and measured?; 4. methods:  cross-sectional vs longitudinal; SA vs. at home; SA vs SA; qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods.

Although not always clearly stated, a lot of study abroad (SA) research has been conducted under a cognitive perspective. Classic SLA theories such as Krashen’s, Long’s, and Swain’s suggest that SA provides the optimal context for language development. With the exception of Krashen, both Long and Swain attach a central role to attention and noticing in the learning process. So, while SA provides an implicit context for language development, the context leads to opportunities for learning with attention. Perhaps it is not at all coincidental that Schmidt’s seminal work on attention and SLA (1990) started with observations of what he labeled noticing in the diary he kept while living abroad in Brazil. More recent approaches to SLA, including neurocognitive approaches suggest that only ‘immersion-like’ conditions lead to an electrophysiological signature typical of native speakers. However, and contrary to all these expectations, SA research often finds minimal or no effects of immersion experience on linguistic development (e.g. Collentine, 2004; Díaz-Campos, 2004 for Spanish). Most studies in this strand of research have compared the SA context and the traditional L2 classroom context regarding lexical and grammatical development and fluency. While these two areas continue to be researched, others have started to join the game, and the point has become very diverse in nature. Of special interest to us in this course are the multiple interactions among internal and external factors that work together or against each other to affect L2 developmnent in SA contexts. Special attention is devoted to the following topics: 1. Context as it affects quantity and quality of input and interaction: study vs stay abroad; program characteristics including length; language vs. content programs; living arrangements; 2. Individual differences: general cognition; aptitude, memory; attitudes, identity; 3. Target: how is language development operationalized and measured?. 4. Method: cross-sectional vs longitudinal; within vs between designs; the problem of the control group

The main goal of this course is to enable graduate students to reach the degree of familiarity with syntactic theory that allows them to read and critically evaluate the literature and to develop an independent research project in syntax. We will read selected foundational papers on Minimalism and use the ideas there as a springboard to explore several key empirical phenomena in depth. The readings will be discussed in class presentations given by both the instructor and the students. A research paper is required.

This course explores sociopolitical issues in the learning, teaching, and use of second languages. In other words, it focuses on how the development and use of multilingual repertoires are connected to power. Sociopolitical factors, like identity, ideology, and inequality, have received a great deal of recent attention with the emergence and reexamination of research on topics like heritage language learning, bilingual education, the global spread of English, education for immigrants, and language policy. We will pay special attention to these areas, but we will also examine how these concepts are connected to language learning in any context. In particular, we will explore questions like: • How do sociopolitical factors (such as identity, ideology, and inequality) compel people to learn multiple languages? • How do sociopolitical factors influence which language(s) people choose to learn? • How are sociopolitical factors connected to what we define or perceive as “successful” language learning? • How do sociopolitical factors enable or constrain people in acquiring a language outside of formal educational contexts (in other words, in naturalistic settings)? • How do sociopolitical factors enable or constrain people in accessing language instruction? • How do sociopolitical factors help some people and hinder others in settings of formal language instruction? • How are sociopolitical circumstances reproduced, reinforced, or resisted by formal language education (for example, in language classrooms or in language learning materials like textbooks)? We will read a selection of recent works in applied linguistics from a variety of established and emerging approaches including linguistic anthropology, critical discourse studies, and educational linguistics. Students will lead discussions and complete an original research project.

LING-7250 introduces central concepts of and tools to be used in second/foreign language testing. The course explores issues of ethics, the theoretical foundations of language assessment including reliability, validity arguments, impact and washback, as well as the technical and practical aspects of developing language tests for different uses and purposes. The course is held concurrently with LING 4250. Students will apply concepts via hands-on course projects, which will involve reviewing an existing language test, discussing a current issue in language testing, developing and critiquing items and completing a final project in test design. For LING 7250, students can instead focus a final project on a specific issue in language testing or conduct independent research on test data or results. Active participation in discussing the readings and relating them to language acquisition, policy and sociolinguistics is critical to the course. Students will also relate current events to the concepts discussed. Structured in a lecture/discussion format. Learning Goals - To become familiar with current language testing theory and practice. - To understand the multi-faceted, iterative, and overlapping process of assessment; - To develop skills in writing, revising, and analyzing results of classroom tests; - To review and critique existing assessment instruments; - To understand how to select tests for particular purposes and situations; - To evaluate research in which language testing plays a part. - To develop a test framework or explore a testing issue or research project in detail

This course explores the application of advanced statistical procedures for the analysis of various language-related phenomena, with a particular focus on language learning, teaching, and testing data. The course assumes familiarity with basic statistical procedures (e.g., correlation, comparing means) as well as facility with graphic and tabular presentation of data. Building from these foundations, the course introduces approaches to factorial and multivariate analysis, including: regression models, factor analysis, MANOVA, discriminant function analysis, and others. Emphasis is placed on the logical and accurate interpretation of analyses in relation to research designs, measurement and error (e.g., reliability) characteristics of the data, and interpretable reporting of statistical findings (e.g., using effect sizes and confidence intervals, effective data visualization techniques). Additional topics may also be addressed based on students’ interests. The principle assignment for this course will involve carrying out a research project involving quantitative data analysis. The main textbook for this course will be:  Plonsky, L. (Ed.) (2015). Advancing quantitative methods in second language research. New York, NY: Routledge

This course explores the nature of identity and how linguistic resources like accent, grammar, and discourse contribute to its expression and interpretation. Students will review the literature on language and identity, ranging from early foundational work in sociolinguistics to the most recent debates on identity as an object of sociolinguistic study. Examining the construction of a number of aspects of identity – gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, age and the life course, and nationhood, as well as how they intersect – will bring to the surface several important themes, among them access, agency, authenticity, borders, community, ideology, indexicality, and style. Together these themes will provide students with a framework for conducting an original research project on the linguistic construction of identity. In addition to carrying out this project, students will be required to present an article of their choice and to write three brief papers bringing together and building off of material in the assigned reading. The intended product of this course will be a theory of language and identity broad enough to encompass all course topics, yet sufficiently refined to be useful when framing individual projects.

Over the past thirty years or so, scholars of language and social life have investigated discourse within a variety of institutional contexts, most notably within schools, courtrooms, corporations, clinics and hospitals. For some of these scholars, these research sites offer intriguing real-life contexts in which their favorite discourse phenomena can be examined in situ; others are lured by a concrete place in which they can investigate the role of language in the relationship between ideology and practice; still others are attracted by an opportunity to work towards the solution of important societal problems, such as those found in relationships (and discourse) between teachers and their students, judges and jury members, employers and their employees, and health care providers and their patients. In Institutional Discourse, you will have multiple opportunities to build on your knowledge and practice of discourse analysis by exploring some of the intriguing regions in which institutions and discourse intersect. During the first few weeks of the course, we will read and discuss both classic and current studies by interactional sociolinguists, conversation analysts, ethnographers, and sociologists (see list below for sample readings) in order to familiarize ourselves with the wide range of notions and phenomena addressed by scholars in the field of institutional discourse. Such topics may include: narratives in institutions; intertextuality; identity construction; ‘talking an institution into being’; institutional gatekeeping encounters; ‘total’ institutions; front- and backstage in institutions; frame-shifting; facework and linguistic politeness; epistemic stance; language and power/agency; discourse shaping effects of professional codes of ethics and principles; and the interrelationships between professional and institutional discourses. Against this backdrop, you will design and carry out an investigation of the discourse associated with a particular institutional context, typically within the areas of education, law, business, or medicine, although others may certainly be explored. Projects may examine discourse along a variety of dimensions, including: 1) inter-professional, intra-professional or professional-lay discourse; 2) face-to-face, computer-mediated/web-based, telephone or snail mail encounters; 3) spoken or written discourse; 4) public or private discourse; 5) monologic, dialogic or multi-party discourse; and 6) type of speech activity or event. You may work on interactions that you have recorded or have identified in an existing data resource, or you may choose to work on interactions that were recorded as part of my own research and/or consulting projects. Students who are interested in working as a linguistic researcher and/or consultant within institutional contexts will find LING 589/789 Institutional Discourse to be a solid introduction to the challenges of doing discourse analysis across disciplinary boundaries. Throughout the semester we will discuss the challenges and rewards of carrying out discourse analysis in the ‘real’ world, drawing on experiences of guest lecturers, my own consulting experiences, and the emerging experiences of students in the course. In the process, we will consider the influence of different disciplinary paradigms in all phases of our research projects -- including decisions about what research questions are thought to be both answerable and important or useful; what participants and settings can be included in a study; what kinds of language data can be collected and how; what types of theoretical frameworks and analytical units can be brought to the research; what counts as research findings; and, finally, how those findings should be reported and to whom. Although specific areas of focus and course activities will be attuned to participants’ interests, preparation, and experience levels, it is expected that they will include the following: • Reading seminal and innovative studies of institutional discourse; • Identifying how linguistic discourse analysis complements and extends analyses from other disciplines; • Interacting with guest speakers; • Learning how to position qualitative work and explain key concepts within discourse analysis and linguistics to scholars and professionals in other fields; • Designing and implementing a study of institutional discourse Prerequisite At least one course in discourse analysis or permission of instructor Requirements Attendance is required; active participation in class discussions based on required readings and analysis of texts and interactions is expected Collection of appropriate data set for the analysis of institutional discourse Preliminary analysis of your data written up in a short paper Facilitation of one in-class workshop on your data, including leading a discussion of readings you selected; Reading journal (reflections on readings and guest speaker visits, including discussion of relevance to your own data set) Brief written responses to other student-facilitated workshops Final paper Questions? Email me at hamilthe@georgetown.edu Selected Readings Agar, Michael. 1985. Institutional discourse. Text 5 (3): 147-168. Barton, Ellen. 2000. Sanctioned and non-sanctioned narratives in institutional discourse. Narrative Inquiry 10: 341-75. Drew, Paul and Paul Heritage (eds.). 1992. Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Erickson, Frederick and Jeffrey Shultz. 1982. Counselor as Gatekeeper. New York: Academic Press. Freed, Alice and Susan Ehrlich (eds.). 2009. Why Do You Ask? The Function of Questions in Institutional Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums: essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. Anchor Books. Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise, Per Linell, and Bengt Nordberg (eds.). 1997. The Construction of Professional Discourse. London and New York: Longman. Heritage, John and Steven Clayman. 2010. Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and Institutions. Wiley-Blackwell. Linde, Charlotte. 2008. Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mayr, Andrea. 2008. Language and Power: An Introduction to Institutional Discourse (Advances in Sociolinguistics). Continuum. Sarangi, Srikant and Celia Roberts (eds.). 1999. Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Life stories express our sense of self: who we are and how we got that way. They are also one very important means by which we communicate this sense of self and negotiate it with others. Further, we use these stories to claim and negotiate group membership and to demonstrate that we are in fact worthy members of those groups, understanding and properly following their moral standards. Finally, life stories touch on the widest of social constructions, since they make presuppositions about what can be taken as expected, what the norms are, and what common or special belief systems can be used to establish coherence. (Linde 1993: 3) This combined lecture/workshop course will introduce you to seminal works by leading scholars to the analysis of life stories and offer you multiple opportunities to examine these stories from a variety of analytical approaches. As a group, we will: • discuss course participants’ interests in the topic of life stories and build the course to allow for these interests to be energetically pursued (these areas of interest may include the following connections: institutions, professions, avocations, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, aging, health concerns and many more) • read widely within the fields of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, and gerontology to understand disciplinary perspectives on what counts as a life story • situate our examination of life stories within the larger landscape of narrative analysis (including personal experience narratives, habitual narratives, small stories, shared stories, narrative retellings, narratives as talk-in-interaction, institutional narratives, etc.) • record and transcribe life stories for analysis during the semester (alternatively, previously recorded life stories found, say, in museum collections or in online collections can be used); these life stories can be told by a single individual or can be co-told by close family members, friends and/or colleagues • consider how life stories are structured, how they are shaped by the interaction in which they are told, and how they function for their tellers and audience members Because most of our time together will be spent comparing and contrasting analytical approaches, identifying relative strengths and weaknesses of the readings, and applying aspects of these readings to transcripts within in-class small-group workshops, I expect you to attend class every week and come prepared to engage fully in these discussions and workshops.

ICOS/LING 7710: Cognitive Science Core Course. A seminar in which important topics in cognitive science are taught by participating Georgetown faculty from the main and medical campuses. Required for the Cognitive Science concentration, available for Ph.D. students in other programs with instructor permission. (Can be taken more than once for credit.)

ICOS/LING 7712: Cognitive Science Core Course. A seminar in which important topics in cognitive science are taught by participating Georgetown faculty from the main and medical campuses. Required for the Cognitive Science concentration, available for Ph.D. students in other programs with instructor permission. (Can be taken more than once for credit.)

Is speech in the mouth or in the brain? Do we hear with our ears or our minds? The answer is: both. The sounds of language are both physical objects and cognitive constructs. The physical aspects of speech are the province of Phonetics: sound waves that are produced by the movement of articulators and received by the ear. Phonology studies cognitive aspects: systematic patterns in the ways that languages combine sounds to create meaning. Various linguistics courses look at Phonology and Phonetics as separate disciplines. This seminar will examine the interaction between the two. The patterns of phonology are often clearly dependent on the principles of phonetics; yet they can also abstract away from them in sometimes complex ways. How different can phonology and phonetics be? How similar? Where exactly does the border between them lie? We will read and discuss both classic and current papers that theorize about how physical and cognitive factors interact in the mind of the speaker, and in the language system as a whole. (We should also have available the manuscript of my new book on the subject, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press.)

Though well over half the world’s languages are tonal (using differences in pitch in order to signal lexical or inflectional contrasts between words), and though the study of tone has played an important role in the historical development of phonological theory, tone remains a relatively under-studied topic in modern phonology. This is a real shame, since tonal phenomena present problems that are as interesting, as challenging, and as beautiful as any others in phonology. In this course, we’ll take a look at some of these problems, and consider what they can teach us about modern phonological theory. The course will proceed in two parallel threads. On the one hand, we’ll be looking at particular tonal phenomena from a broad typological perspective. For example, we’ll consider processes such as tone spreading (e.g. ??? ? ????) and tone shift (??? ? ???) in a wide variety of languages, and we’ll try to arrive at general answers to questions like • What motivates tone spread and shift, and what is the synchronic relationship between the two (if any?) • Why do tones sometimes spread/shift in a bounded domain (within two or three syllables) while others spread/ shift unboundedly over any number of syllables? • What positions within a word attract (or repel) spreading or shifting tones? • What factors act to block spread/shift? • In languages where spread/shift is asymmetrical (e.g. where a H tone spreads or shifts but L does not), what is the source of this asymmetry? Some other topics that we’ll consider from a broad typological perspective include the representation of tonal contrasts, the potentially variable representation of contour tones, the relationship between tone and segmental properties (especially the laryngeal properties of consonants), and tonal assimilation and dissimilation. On the other hand, we’ll be looking closely at a wide range of individual languages (e.g. Mazatec, Akan, Hausa, Zulu, Kikuyu, Thai, Cantonese) to see how different tonal processes interact with one another within them, and how our grammar must be structured in order to adequately account for these interactions. We’ll pay particularly close attention to real and apparent instances of tonal opacity, which intuitively seem to require elaborate multi-stage derivations. These cases are abundant within tonal phonology, and are one of the main reasons why phonologists working on tone have been reluctant to adopt surface-based theories of phonology like Optimality Theory. There’s no consensus opinion right now on how these cases should be handled – we’ll seek to arrive at our own consensus over the course of the semester.

Experimental testing can usefully confirm and extend various aspects of phonological theory. This class is intended to provide an introduction to experimental phonology. In this course, we will examine (a) how to derive experimentally testable predictions from a theory, (b) how to design and run an experiment, and (c) how to interpret the results. The class has several goals: • Consider the relation between phonological theory, empirical predictions, and experimental results • Gain practical knowledge in designing and carrying out experiments, including; Creating and controlling test stimuli Choosing an experimental paradigm Setting up and running the experiment Basic data analysis, using R • Gain familiarity with some commonly used experimental paradigms, comparing what they can tell us about the linguistic system The class will be arranged around a set of theoretical hypotheses concerning principles of phonology that have benefited from experimental investigation. Tentatively, topics may include perceptibility and contrast, statistical generalization from the lexicon, biased generalization, and loanword adaptation.

The patterns of phonology are often clearly dependent on the principles of phonetics; yet they can also abstract away from them in sometimes complex ways. How different or similar can phonology and phonetics be? Where exactly does the border between the two lie? Over the course of this semester, we will examine both classic approaches and current theories of the phonology/phonetics interface, and will consider the roles of historical, articulatory, perceptual, and cognitive forces in creating and maintaining phonological patterns. We will also consider the implications of phonological and phonetic findings for theories of language change and acquisition.

This course provides an introduction to child language acquisition from the perspective of linguistic theory. We will focus on how to account for the complex and abstract linguistic knowledge that children develop, and on how that account is both informed by and contributes to linguistic theory. Topics to be covered include: the notion of Universal Grammar and how it has evolved over the past several decades; issues of learnability (including a hypothesized ‘poverty of the stimulus’ and the role of negative evidence in language development); the hypothesized role of linguistic parameters in language learning (including acquisition studies of specific parameters and more general questions concerning the evolution and validity of parameter theory for language acquisition); more recent Minimalist approaches to language acquisition; the acquisition of morphosyntactic functional categories and features; and the extent to which knowledge of language at earlier stages of language development is of the same type or ‘continuous’ with the kind of knowledge mature native speakers possess.

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Phonological alternations can be sensitive to morphological context. This seminar examines the interaction between morphology and phonology more deeply, asking which morphosyntactic elements, domains, or categories can trigger phonological alternations, and whether morphology can also be sensitive to phonology. How closely are the two modules of grammar connected? Over the course of the semester, we will examine a wide range of approaches to the morphology/phonology interface, and a wide range of cross-linguistic data. We will then consider which approaches make the best predictions about the morphophonological processes we see across languages.

The verb seems to guide both the building of structure and the semantic composition of the sentence. We see this, for example, in the fact that the verb is responsible for the transitivity of the sentence (whether it contains a direct object or not) and in the fact that the semantic roles of subjects and objects are determined by the verb. And yet, recent work has questioned whether it is the verb itself that takes on these roles, or the structure which surrounds the verb. In this seminar, we will discuss a variety of topics in the syntax and semantics of the verb that have been important in recent debates, including argument association, aspectual composition, adverbial modification, transitivity, and complementation patterns. The two instructors bring different expertise to the course: Alison Biggs is a syntactician who researches argument structure and morphosyntactic structure, among other topics; Paul Portner is a formal semanticist who has recently focused on mood, modality, the syntactic representation and discourse participants. We will pursue our investigation of each topic in an integrated way, as we master the relevant literature in formal semantics and syntax and use the tools of each field to enrich and make precise the ideas which have been developed in the other.

This course is an advanced graduate seminar in phonology that examines the ways in which tone, a phonological phenomenon, serves a morphological or syntactic function across languages, referred to as grammatical or melodic tone. We will discuss typological issues in grammatical tone relating to their properties, and where grammatical tone is found cross-linguistically, but our focus will be on African and Mesoamerican languages. We will also discuss methodological approaches to analyzing grammatical tone such as floating autosegmental tones, tonal rules or tonal construction schemas and how grammatical tone interacts with phonological rules and morphosyntactic derivations. The class will also investigate how grammatical tones incorporate tonal and intonational properties. Some of the questions we will explore include: (i) what is the range of variation documented to date in grammatical tone systems? (ii) what kind of phenomena motivate different types of analyses? (iii) what kinds of predictions are made within each type of analytical approach? (iv) what is the relationship (if any) between types of grammatical tone patterns and other aspects of individual languages' prosodic systems (e.g., size of tonal inventory, distribution of tones, etc.)? Students who enroll in the seminar will be encouraged to consider previously unanalyzed data in developing novel analyses.

This seminar will introduce current developments in the study of theories of event structure and verb meaning. The central problem we will be considering will be the relationship between ‘verbs’, and the event structure of the phrase/clause. We will make particular use of syntactic and morphological evidence to examine this question. The first part of the semester will introduce some foundational ideas. In the second part we will go through some individual case studies that illustrate the main views posited in recent work, or that motivate, extend, or adapt those views. Representative phenomena that we will look at include derived states, resultative predication, causation, and possession. The course will be project oriented: the goal is to get participants engaged in producing research projects that apply recent theoretical insights and questions introduced in the first part of the semester to novel data sets. The aim is that the last part of the course will go in some new directions, based on student interests/projects.

Topics in semantics focusing on Spanish, including negation, tense and aspect, and the subjunctive.

Sentence moods and intonation The concepts of clause types and sentence moods are used to analyze the relation between grammatical form and conversational function. For example, interrogative sentences have a special connection to the function of asking a question, even though they can, of course, be used as indirect speech acts with other functions. This canonical function of a clause type is often labeled the sentential force. Theories of clause types and sentence moods have traditionally focused on explaining the sentential forces of the three major clause types: declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives.In addition to the major types, there has been some research on minor types like exclamatives and promissives. Beyond these canonical cases, research on clause types and sentence moods has extended to the effects of intonation of sentential force. For example, declaratives with rising intonation can be used to ask a question, but are not equivalent to interrogatives (Gunlogson 2001, Jeong 2018, Rudin 2022). Similarly, intonation affects the interpretation of imperatives (Portner 2018, Rudin 2018). This role of intonation challenges traditional ideas about sentential force. In a similar way some work has examined the special semantics of embedded clause structures used as main clauses, such as root infinitives and subjunctives (Grohmann & Etxepare 2003, Oikonomou 2016, Portner et al. 2022), and at constructions which combine the properties of multiple clause types, such as wh-imperatives (Reis & Rosengren 1992, Kaufmann 2013). In this course, we will aim to better understand the nature of clause types and sentential force, with special attention to the interpretation of intonation.

Resumptive pronouns are pronominal elements (typically pronouns) that appear in the positions one might other- wise have expected to find a gap (e.g. 'She’s the kind of employee that you never really know if {she / *__ } will show up to work on time'). Resumptive phenomena have figured prominently in work on long-distance dependencies, in particular concerning the capacity of resumption to void island violations. One of the central questions guiding this research has been: what properties do dependencies terminating in resumptive pronouns share with similar dependencies terminating in gaps? The results of this work have uncovered a heterogeneous picture of resumptivity across—and even within—languages.

In this seminar, we will explore the cross-linguistically rich empirical landscape of resumption, including (canonical) resumption in wh-questions and relative clauses, resumption in dislocation constructions (e.g. clitic left dislocation), and resumption in A-dependencies (e.g. copy raising). Furthermore, we will investigate what implications these diverse phenomena have for our understanding of several central concepts in the theory of syntax, including: cyclicity, (morphosyntactic) connectivity, reconstruction, competition and last resort, and (defective) multiple copy spellout and the syntax-PF mapping.

In the last decade, there has been a tremendous and welcome expansion of research in the psycholinguistics, acquisition, and neurolinguistics of semantics and pragmatics. In this course, we will learn about four very active such topics: 1. Processing Presuppositions 2. Acquiring Adjectives 3. Learning the Lexicon 4. Interpreting Implicatures In each section, we will first review the basic background on each range of phenomena, and then delve into the experimental literature with the goal of both understanding the methodologies being used and evaluating the importance of the findings for semantics/pragmatics, on the one hand, and for the theory of language processing or acquisition, on the other. Interested students will have an opportunity to design and run their own studies as part of the course, but students may also complete the course with only written assignments. Students should have taken at least one Semantics/Pragmatics course (such as LING/SPAN 531). We welcome participation from students in any relevant area, including the following: cognitive science, formal semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, applied linguistics, and psychology. Requirements: 1. Regular reading and active participation 2. Presentations of target articles 3. Short papers (approx. 5 page) at several points during the semester 4. Term paper a. Students signing up for 538: 10-15 page paper. b. Students signing up for 738: either a longer paper or an experimental project Possible Readings Processing Presuppositions Chemla, Emmanuel. 2009. Presuppositions of quantified sentences: experimental data. Natural Language Semantics 17(4):299–340. doi:\bibinfo{doi}{10.1007/s11050-009-9043-9}. URL http://www. springerlink.com/content/xw182722l66v7100/. Chemla, Emmanuel and Lewis Bott. 2013. Processing presuppositions: Dynamic semantics vs pragmatic enrichment. Language and Cognitive Processes 38(3):241–260. Chemla, Emmanuel and Philippe Schlenker. 2012. Incremental vs. symmetric accounts of presupposition projection: an experimental approach. Natural Language Semantics 20(2):177–226. doi:\bibinfo{doi} {10.1007/s11050-012-9080-7}. URL http://www.springerlink.com/content/x1830j0872140612/ abstract/. Romoli, J., Sudo, Y. and Snedeker, J. (2012). An Experimental Investigation of Presupposition Projection in Conditional Sentences. In Neil Ashton, Anca Chereches, and David Lutz (eds.) Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 21. Romoli, J., Khan, M., Sudo, Y., & Snedeker, J. (2015). Solving temporary referential ambiguity using presupposed content. In Schwarz, F. (Ed.),Experimental Perspectives on Presuppositions (pp. 67-87). Springer International Publishing. Schwarz, F. 2007. Processing presupposed content. Journal of Semantics 24(4):373–416. Acquiring Adjectives Barner, D. & Snedeker, J. (2008). Compositionality and statistics in adjective acquisition: 4-year olds interpret tall and short based on the size distributions of novel noun referents. Child Development, 79(3), 594-608. Syrett, K., Kennedy, C., & Lidz, J. (2010). Meaning and context in children’s understanding of gradable adjectives. Journal of Semantics, 27(1), 1-35. Syrett, K., Bradley, E., Kennedy, C., & Lidz, J. (2006). Shifting standards: Children’s understanding of gradable adjectives. In K. Ud Deen, J. Nomura, B. Schulz, & B. D. Schwartz (Eds.), Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition - North America (GALANA), Honolulu, HI (pp. 353-364). Cambridge, Mass: UConn Occasional Papers in Linguistics 4. Learning the Lexicon Barner, D., Wagner, L. & Snedeker, J. (2008). Events and the ontology of individuals: Verbs as a source of individuating nouns. Cognition, 106(2), 1-6. Hartshorne, J. K., Pogue, A., & Snedeker, J. (2015). Love is hard to underst and: The relationship between transitivity and caused events in the acquisition of emotion verbs. To appear in Journal of Child Language. Hartshorne, J. K., & Snedeker, J. (2012) Verb argument structure predicts implicit causality: The advantages of finer-grained semantics. Language and Cognitive Processes, 1-35. Papafragou, A., Fairchild, S., Cohen, M., & Friedberg, C. (in press). Learning words from speakers with false beliefs. Journal of Child Language. Landau, B., Johannes, K., Skordos, D., & Papafragou, A. (2016). Containment and support: Core and complexity in spatial language learning. Cognitive Science. (e-pub before printed version) Bunger, A., Skordos, D., Trueswell, J., & Papafragou, A. (2016). How adults and children encode causative events cross-linguistically: Implications for language production and attention. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. (e-pub before printed version) Interpreting Implicatures Barner, D., Chow, K., & Yang, S. J. (2009). Finding one’s meaning: A test of the relation between quantifiers and integers in language development. Cognitive Psychology, 58, 195–219. Hartshorne, J. K., Snedeker, J., Liem Azar, S. Y. M., & Kim, A. E. (2015). The neural computation of scalar implicature, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 30(5), 620-634. DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2014.981195 Huang, Y. & Snedeker, J. (2011). Logic and conversation revisited: Evidence for a division between semantic and pragmatic content in real-time language comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26(8), 1161-1172. Noveck, I. A., & Sperber, D. (2007). The why and how of experimental pragmatics: The case of ‘scalar inferences’. In N. Burton-Roberts (Ed.), Advances in pragmatics. Palgrave: Basingstoke. Papafragou, A., & Musolino, J. (2003). Scalar implicatures: Experiments at the semantics pragmatics interface. Cognition, 86, 253–282. Schulze, C., Grassmann, S., & Tomasello, M. (2013). 3-year-old children make relevance inferences in indirect verbal communication. Child development, 84 (6), 2079–2093. Skordos, D., & Papafragou, A. (2016). Children’s derivation of scalar implicatures: alternatives and relevance. Cognition. 153: 6-18. Verbuk, A., & Shultz, T. (2010). Acquisition of relevance implicatures: A case against a rationality-based account of conversational implicatures. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 2297–2313. de Villiers, P. A., de Villiers, J., Coles-White, D. J., & Carpenter, L. (2009). Acquisition of relevance implicatures in typically-developing children and children with autism. In J. Chandlee, M. Franchini, S. Lord, & G. M. Rheiner (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33th annual boston university conference on language development (pp. 121–132). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Have you studied abroad and want to process and share your experiences? Are you considering studying abroad, but would like to know more about languages, cultures and expectations? Are you wondering how you can build on a study abroad experience for your future career? This new course offered in the Department of linguistics will allow students to explore these questions while deepening their understanding of the connections between study abroad, and learning about foreign languages and cultures: • Foundations of Study Abroad • When did students begin to study abroad and why? History, background and context of study abroad. What factors are helpful to consider when choosing/reflecting on a study abroad experience? • Study Abroad for Language Learning • Expectations and reality of language learning outcomes. How to get the most out of linguistic opportunities and interactions abroad. • Cross-Cultural Communication in Study Abroad Contexts • Cross-cultural differences and problems that can arise, how to recognize and address issues including encountering new dialects (British English, for example), and how language, gender, power and politics can interact during a study abroad. • Issues of bicultural understanding, acquisition and development • Educational implications • Using study abroad to collect data (interviews, photos, archival work) for a senior thesis or final paper. Short-term summer program to and preparation for full semesters abroad. Setting realistic but ambitious goals for language and culture learning. • How to use a study abroad experience for your career preparation, for graduate programs, or to find research opportunities. • Discussion of the implications of study abroad for the Georgetown community and beyond. This exciting new course welcomes students who plan to study abroad in the future as well as students who have already studied abroad and would like to process, share and expound on their experiences. Students enrolled in this course will present a final project on a study abroad region and topic of their choice (involving a new culture, a foreign language, or both).

Doctoral Seminar on IDs and Learning Contexts in SLA Of special interest to us in this course are the multiple interactions among internal and external factors that work together or against each other to affect L2/multilingual development. Special attention is devoted to the following topics: a) Context: immersion; traditional variables in ISLA including feedback; CALL; b. Individual differences: general cognition; aptitude, memory; motivation, anxiety; identity; c) Target: the way language development is operationalized and measured; d) Method:  qualitative, quantitative, mixed; cross-sectional vs longitudinal; the issue of comparisons and the nature of control groups.

Over the past 15 years, a number of key principles from Cognitive Linguistics (CL), a usage-based approach to language, have figured prominently in an impressive range of linguistic inquiry, including psycholinguistics (e.g. Coulson; Spivey), cognitive psychology (e.g., Boroditsky ; Casasanto), first language learning (e.g, Tomasello), second language learning (e.g. Cadierno et al ; Ellis; Tyler), [critical] discourse analysis ( e.g., Dancygier & Sweeter; Tenbrink; Wodak) and corpus linguistics (e.g., Gries; Wulff). These key principles include (but are not limited to) syntax as meaningful constructions (construction grammar, e.g., Goldberg, 1994; Bergen & Chang, 2005) embodiment and embodied semantics (e.g., Bergen, 2012; Spivey, 2007), conceptual metaphor theory (e.g, Lakoff, 1987), linguistic relativity (e.g. Casasanto, 2013; Slobin, 1986, 1997); and conceptual transfer (e.g. Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008). In this seminar, we will learn about these key principles and examine work which applies them to select issues reflecting the precise interest of the seminar participants. Students will develop research projects focusing on applications of CL to their particular area of interest. Readings will be a set of select articles and chapters available on BB.

Research synthesis refers to a continuum of techniques that have been developed by social scientists with the aim to review past literature systematically. Meta-analysis is probably the best known of these techniques, and it serves to mathematically synthesize quantitative research for areas in which sufficient (and sufficiently comparable) research has accumulated. Simply put, research syntheses (including meta-analyses) are contemporary literature reviews that differ from the traditional approaches by taking a radically empirical perspective on the task of reviewing. This course introduces students to the principles and practices of research synthesis, including systematic procedures for: (a) the sampling of primary research studies, (b) the evaluation and classification of substantive and methodological features, and (c) the analysis and interpretation of study findings. The course also familiarizes students with meta-analytic techniques for summarizing and interpreting findings across groups of quantitative primary studies. The seminar will be methodological in nature, but the methodologies will be learned by careful application to several current research domains in areas of language study that reflect the diverse expertise of the seminar participants. Participants will carry out a single-authored or collaborative synthesis project targeting a research domain where they have already developed substantive expertise. The final paper should report on the piloting of the full cycle involved in carrying out a systematic research synthesis. Support for the projects will be provided so as to enhance the chances of future publication. Readings will come primarily from the following textbooks (and a selection of articles): Norris, J. M., & Ortega, L. (Eds.). (2006). Synthesizing research on language learning and teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [ISBN: 978 90 272 1966 4] Cumming, G. (2012). Understanding The new statistics: Effect sizes, confidence intervals, and meta-analysis. New York: Routledge. [ISBN-13: 978-0415879682] Lipsey, M. W., & Wilson, D. B. (2001). Practical meta-analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. [ISBN: 978-0761921684]

LING-750 introduces central concepts of and tools to be used in second/foreign language testing. The course explores issues of ethics, the theoretical foundations of language assessment including reliability, validity arguments, impact and washback, as well as the technical and practical aspects of developing language tests for different uses and purposes. The course is held concurrently with LING 350. Students will apply concepts via hands-on course projects, which will involve reviewing an existing language test, discussing a current issue in language testing, developing and critiquing items and completing a final project in test design. For LING 750, students can instead focus a final project on a specific issue in language testing or conduct independent research on test data or results. Active participation in discussing the readings and relating them to language acquisition, policy and sociolinguistics is critical to the course. Students will also relate current events to the concepts discussed. Structured in a lecture/discussion format. Learning Goals - To become familiar with current language testing theory and practice. - To understand the multi-faceted, iterative, and overlapping process of assessment; - To develop skills in writing, revising, and analyzing results of classroom tests; - To review and critique existing assessment instruments; - To understand how to select tests for particular purposes and situations; - To evaluate research in which language testing plays a part. - To develop a test framework or explore a testing issue or research project in detail

This seminar examines the present watershed point in linguistics where there is wide recognition that the history of the discipline is deeply entangled with colonial and postcolonial injustice and that a decolonial linguistics is a needed (if difficult) paradigm shift. We will read about ontological erasures and epistemic injustices that need to be disrupted, related to Euro-North-American biases in how language is understood, how language learning and social practices are investigated, and how knowledge about linguistics is produced. We will study ideas about language, multilingualism, and raciolinguistics that come from Southern, Indigenous, and decolonial scholars in Latin America, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East/North Africa and we will trace how they have been taken up by critical linguists in the Global North. The seminar will support students in the writing of a positionality statement (a key decolonizing strategy that seeks to interrogate ontologies and voices/identities) and in the development of a final project that can be an autoethnography, a multi-book review, a re-analysis of existing data using a decolonial lens, and/or a critical literature review.

Seminar in Language Acquisition Spring 2012 Topic: Acquisition and the Human Language Faculty Meeting time Wednesdays, 3:30-6:00 Course instructor: Donna Lardiere Contact info: lardiere@georgetown.edu Course description and objectives: In this seminar we will take a look at the relationship between aspects of grammatical representation and the inductive learning of language. The primary objective of the course is to consider (or reconsider) the relationship between models of formal linguistic description and language processing, and how both of these are needed for us to account for acquisition. We will try to examine what the architecture of the human language faculty must be like (approximately) in order for acquisition to be able to occur. One of our texts for the course will be selected chapters from Susanne Carroll's (2001) book Input and Evidence which (citing from its back cover) “embeds discussion of input within a framework which includes a serious treatment of language processing, including the problem of modularity and the question of how semantic representations can influence grammatical ones.” Chapter topics include property and transition theories of language knowledge, representational and developmental problems of language acquisition, constraints on inductive learning, a discussion of the validity of the logical problem of language acquisition and input and modularity. We’ll also read the first two parts from Jackendoff's (2002) Foundations of Language. Carroll's book is primarily concerned with second language acquisition, but is also applicable in many relevant respects to first language acquisition, and Jackendoff’s goal is to describe the architecture of the language faculty in a way that connects formal linguistics with research about how the brain processes language (and other modules). We’ll also read sections of J. A. Hawkins’ (2004) Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars, which argues for innate processing hierarchies that structure children’s initial hypotheses in language acquisition, and some work by Yang (e.g., 2004) that integrates probabilistic mechanisms with formal linguistic constraints in acquisition. There may be additional readings as time and class interests permit. Prerequisites: A course in syntax and a course in language acquisition (or permission of the instructor). Requirements. 1. Above all, you need to complete the assigned reading for the week and come to class prepared to discuss it. There are likely to be study questions distributed in advance of our meeting that will direct your focus for how to prepare for class discussion, and you may have some of your own questions to add. 2. Each of you will contribute and direct a presentation of a reading or set of readings, including taking responsibility for synthesis (if there is any to be done), advance study questions and introducing in as simple and clear a fashion as possible any required background information that is referred to in the reading that is among the points you wish to highlight for that reading. This means you may have to do a little additional research for your presentation above and beyond just what is in the reading itself. I will gladly help you with this to the best of my ability. The combined requirements (1-2) above will make-up 60% of your grade for the class. (3) You need to write a final paper, anywhere from 15-25 double-spaced pages. The nature of the paper will be self-directed in the sense that you may tailor its content and length to what you hope to get out of this course. You may design or redesign or replicate a first or second language acquisition study. This paper will make up the remaining 40% of your grade for the course.

U.S. world language education, or the teaching and learning of languages other than English, faces several pressing challenges. Fewer students are studying languages, and program closings have made national news in recent years. In this seminar, we will explore the current state of world language education from the perspectives of students, language educators, program administrators, policy makers, and researchers, with the goal of understanding how the U.S. system has evolved over time and what forces shape its current state. Course readings will cover K-12, secondary, and post-secondary world language education, and topics will include the enrollment crisis in higher education, the growth of dual language education in K-12, the policy landscape, and how world language education is funded. Students will understand the complex local and national forces shaping language education in the U.S., be able to contextualize and critically analyze language educational trends, and consider the role of researchers in the current landscape.

Multilinguals are people who grow up with one, two, or three languages in the family and who will add additional languages to their repertoire during early or later life experiences, which they undergo by choice or force, including education, travel, or migration. The phenomenon is as old as humanity, but its investigation has exploded in the last decade, giving rise to the formal study of L3 acquisition and multilingualism. This seminar explores individual multilingualism across the lifespan, with a dual attention to learning and teaching. For learning, we will examine three types of factors that affect multilingual outcomes. How do the languages of multilinguals interact, and what crosslinguistic effects arise from it? Here two central questions are multidirectional sources of transfer and the multilingual boost in learning new subsequent languages. How does experience of language (e.g., meaningful usage, social networks, domains of use, literacy) shape the multicompetence of multilinguals? Here the overarching themes will be statistical learning and multilingual unlearning and relearning of multiple languages across the life span. How do multilinguals view their environments, their languages, and themselves? In this regard, we will learn about the emic and identity lifeworlds of multilinguals and factors that impact on their well-being, such as language ideologies, beliefs about language learning, multilingual emotions, and perceived positive language interaction. For teaching, we will ask: What are optimal instructional strategies for multilinguals? We will examine three proposals: intercomprehension, translanguaging, and critical language awareness. The seminar is designed so as to support students through an empirical study of multilinguals and their multilingualism in one of the areas covered in the course. There will be a reading packet and two textbooks: Todeva, E. & Cenoz, J. (Eds.) (2009). The multiple realities of multilingualism: Personal narratives and researchers’ perspectives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Braun, A. & Cline, T. (2014). Language strategies for trilingual families: Parents’ perspectives. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Note: This course is scheduled to be offered in complementary alternation with SPAN 726 Bilingualism and Cognition (Sanz).

This class focuses on individual differences amongst second language learners and speakers. These include motivation, the understanding and realization of interactional opportunities and linguistic identities, and how these impact language production and development. We will study a diverse set of linguistic forms focusing on speakers of Mandarin Chinese, Farsi and Spanish, and their ESL/EFL learning outcomes. Members of class, all of whom must have taken a class in research methodology, and a prior seminar, will conduct research and complete a substantial research paper, individually or in pairs, covering one of the topics of the class.

Description: This is a pre-dissertation level seminar offering training in advanced discourse analysis, with a focus on apologies. The goal is to use discourse analysis to investigate naturally-occurring discourse in any context of interest to students. The class will survey classic and current literature in interactional sociolinguistics, intertextuality, identity and/or other theoretical and methodological issues relevant to seminar members' interests. The class will examine each other's discourse data in workshop format. The goal and expectation is that final papers will be potentially publishable and eventually published.Requirements:Bibliography: Each student will be responsible for finding, summarizing, and commenting on 10 outside readings, and for providing both a one-page written summary and a five-minute oral summary of each outside reading. These readings will form the basis for the literature review section of each student's final paper.Final paper: Each student will conduct an independent research project which will provide the material for workshop-style class analysis; a presentation of pre-final findings; and a final paper of 25-30 pages. Final papers are expected to be of near-publishable quality.Required reading:A reading packet will be assembled to reflect class interests.Recommended reading:Becker, A.L. 1995. Beyond translation: Essays toward a modern philology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Gumperz, John J. 1982. Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tannen, Deborah. 2007. Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue and imagery in conversational discourse second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Other requirements and limitations:Attendance is required. No auditors, no incompletes, no late papers.Prerequisites:Discourse Analysis: Conversation or Discourse Analysis: Narrative; advanced graduate standing or demonstrated interest in a related area; permission of the instructor.

This course is dedicated to exploring the intricate ways in which co-present interactants integrate an array of communicative resources, including voice qualities, gestures and gesticulation, facial expressions, eye gaze, body postures, etc., to pursue various social actions in their ongoing discourse. We will survey research on multimodality and examine video recordings of naturally occurring interactions in a variety of cultures. Through this process, we will build skills for collecting, transcribing, editing, analyzing, and presenting video data and using digital tools for effectively working with multimodal data. In addition to taking part in reading discussions, analyses, and data sessions, students will conduct independent projects on multimodal interaction based on their own data or data from archived sources.

Over the past thirty years or so, scholars of language and social life have been analyzing discourse within a variety of professional contexts, most notably medicine, law, education, government, and business. For some of these scholars, these research sites offer intriguing real-life contexts in which their favorite discourse phenomena can be examined in situ; others are lured by a concrete place in which they can investigate the role of language in the relationship between ideology and practice; still others are attracted by an opportunity to work towards the solution of important societal problems, such as those found in relationships (and talk) between physicians and their patients, judges and jury members, teachers and their students, government employees and citizens, or employers and their employees. We’ve learned a good deal from this cross-disciplinary work. In fact, in recent years more and more professionals in other disciplines know about discourse analysis and its power to illuminate real-life problems. Many of us are called on to work as consultants in cross-disciplinary projects. And – through this involvement – many of us are learning that such work is rarely straightforward; it’s not usually enough just to be trained as a discourse analyst and then to carry out one’s work in another field. Accommodation and compromise are usually necessary. Working across disciplines can be a challenge. Different disciplinary paradigms dominate decisions regarding what kinds of research questions are thought to be both answerable and useful or important. These paradigms also influence what participants and settings can be included in the study, what kinds of language data can be collected and how, what types of theoretical frameworks and analytical units can be brought to the research, as well as what counts as research findings, and how these findings should be reported. But – for many of us – seeing our work impact society in significant ways is well worth this extra effort. Being prepared for the kinds of differences that can exist when undertaking cross-disciplinary research and being armed with suggestions regarding how to make the most of one’s role in such research can make the crucial difference between a discourse analyst leaving a project in frustration or being able to contribute to lasting changes. This seminar on Cross-Disciplinary Discourse Analysis offers this kind of preparation to the interested student. Although specific areas of focus and seminar activities will be attuned to seminar participants’ interests, preparation, and experience levels, it is expected that they will include all major phases of cross-disciplinary involvement: -Getting involved: Establishing the researcher's role -Setting the course: Developing the research question and project design -Working on the ground: Observing, interviewing, and taping -Making sense of the discourse: Analyzing and reporting Throughout the semester we’ll discuss the challenges and rewards of carrying out discourse analysis in the 'real' world, drawing on experiences of guest lecturers, my own consulting experiences, and the emerging experiences of students in the seminar. The discussion will revolve around the theme of balance: as a researcher working effectively across disciplines, one must be ready both to learn and to teach; to take alternate perspectives as insider and outsider as the project progresses; to serve one's own disciplinary goals at times, but to allow those goals to take a secondary place when other professional goals need to be served; to assert one's position strongly at times and to be ready to compromise at others; to be patient when disciplinary differences or practicalities of teamwork do not allow the most expeditious resolution of a problem, all the while holding to the conviction that the extra effort that goes into this kind of research endeavor will ultimately impact society in some of the ways the researcher anticipated. Prerequisite: at least one course in discourse analysis Course activities will include: Reading seminal and innovative studies by discourse analysts working in other disciplines Interacting with guest lecturers - discourse analysts who work either fulltime or as consultants with individuals from other disciplines Identifying how linguistic discourse analysis complements and extends analyses from other disciplines by participating in multidisciplinary team investigations of interaction Learning how to position qualitative work and explain key concepts within discourse analysis and linguistics to people outside the field Learning about different disciplinary conventions in abstract-writing, academic presentations and publications Designing and implementing a cross-disciplinary discourse analytic study

Description: This is a pre-dissertation level seminar providing training in advanced discourse analysis, with a focus on the discourse of digital media. The class will analyze naturally-occurring interaction among family and friends, in such digital media platforms as Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, email, gChat, texting, Snap Chat, Snap Story, Twitter, Skype, and so on. We will survey the literature in CMD (Computer-Mediated Discourse) and the classic and current literature in interactional sociolinguistics, intertextuality, framing, and identity, and explore a range of theoretical and methodological issues relevant to seminar members' research. Each class member will collect and analyze a body of naturally-occurring digital discourse; all class members' discourse data will be examined and analyzed by the entire class in workshop format. Requirements: Bibliography: Each student will be responsible for finding, summarizing, and commenting on 9 outside readings, and for providing both a one-page written summary and a five-minute oral summary of each for class. Students’ outside readings will form the basis for the literature review section of their term papers. Term paper: Each student will conduct an independent research project which will provide the material for both a class presentation and a final paper of 25-30 pages. Papers are expected to be of publishable quality and it is strongly recommended that they eventually be published. Required reading: Articles to be distributed in class Recommended reading: Becker, A.L. 1995. Beyond translation: Essays toward a modern philology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Gumperz, John J. 1982. Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schiffrin, Deborah. 1994. Approaches to discourse. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Tannen, Deborah. 2007. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Second edition, with new Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tannen, Deborah. 2005. Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends. New edition. Oxford & NY: Oxford University Press. Other requirements and limitations: Attendance is required. No auditors, no incompletes, no late papers, no laptops in class.

This course investigates the relationship between discourse and power in a variety of institutions, including legal, medical, political, corporate, and educational. Drawing on microanalytic frameworks of conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics, we will explore the discursive re-production and transformation of institutional power (a)symmetries, norms, and objectives. In this process, we will consider the practical problems and solutions for (re)negotiating institutional power (a)symmetries, and we will reflect on key methodological issues, analytical procedures, and ethical concerns in examining institutional discourse and power. In addition to taking part in reading discussions and data sessions, you will design and carry out an independent microanalytic study of discourse and power in an institutional context of your choice. You will write-up your study as a manuscript that could be submitted to an academic journal.

Intertextuality is a notion which has become widely used as a theoretical framework within the field of literary criticism since it was first named as such by Kristeva (1974), drawing on Bakhtin (1965, 1973, see also 1981). Over the past decade or so, linguists have shown an interest in the notion of intertextuality; prior texts are seen to be important to general linguistic theory as well as to an understanding of textual meaning and the discursive construction of identity and ideology. But both the theoretical approaches and the types of texts used in the two fields are so different as to make one believe that any similarity begins and ends with the label ‘intertextuality’. It is the aim of this course to bridge the chasm between literary approaches and discourse analytic approaches as we attempt to move the notion of ‘intertextuality’ from that of a multidisciplinary nature (i.e., of interest to different disciplines) to that of an interdisciplinary nature (i.e., drawing on and synthesizing the analyses of different disciplines). After becoming familiar with foundational works on intertextuality in both fields, students will collect spoken and/or written texts and use these to ground their emerging understanding of intertextuality. As we begin to operationalize the notion of intertextuality, we will grapple with a variety of issues due, in part, to disciplinary differences between literary criticism and linguistics. Two of the most critical issues are 1) the definition of ‘text’ and, subsequently, of ‘intertextuality’ and 2) the role of author meaning and intentionality. Requirements Attendance is required; active participation in class discussions based on required readings and analysis of texts is expected Collection of appropriate data set for the analysis of intertextuality One in-class oral presentation, including assignment and discussion of relevant reading(s) Reading journal (reflections on readings, including discussion of relevance to student’s own data set; responses to other students’ presentations) Final paper

This seminar offers training in advanced discourse analysis, with a focus on apologies, thanks, and related speech acts in a cross-cultural perspective. The goal is to analyze naturally occurring conversational discourse in any context and any language of interest to students. The class will survey literature on apologies and thanks in relation to each other, and to other speech acts that can function in similar ways in a range of languages and cultures. In addition, the class will address major discourse analytic topics, theories, and methods, such as interactional sociolinguistics, intertextuality, framing, and power & solidarity. Another goal is to hone students’ skills in writing academic research papers. Toward that end, each student will conduct an independent research project that will be workshopped in the class and lead to a potentially publishable paper.

This course is an advanced graduate seminar in which we will look in depth at a number of topic areas within forensic linguistics, as well as conduct original, publishable quality research on a topic area of your choice. We will also work on a class project, TBD. During our first class meeting, we will learn about each other's interests and backgrounds and discuss what topics we want to look into during the course of the semester. I will give a brief overview/review of forensic linguistics and some of its various topic areas. Please also come prepared with a list of areas/topics of interest to you. The course will be structured so that I will lead the discussion for about half the class periods, with students taking the lead for the other half. Each student will be responsible for leading in-depth discussion of a topic area of interest, most likely related to their term research project. I will lead discussions of authorship attribution/author profiling, speaker identification/voice recognition, professionalism and ethics in forensic linguistics, and possibly also deception detection. Students may elect to delve further into these areas or consider areas such as (but are not limited to): threat assessment, plagiarism, analysis of suicide notes, language crimes (e.g. bribery, perjury), contract disputes, trademark/copyright disputes, the language of the law/courtroom, courtroom interactions, language testing and asylum seeking. Course Requirements: The chief assignments for the course are a term research project culminating in a paper publishable in a peer-reviewed journal such as the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, and a class project TBD. Students may do projects individually or in pairs/small groups. Grading: Individual/small group research project: 50% Participation in class project: 25% Class participation, including leading a discussion: 25%

The field of sociophonetics is concerned with ‘identifying, and ultimately explaining, the sources, loci, patterns, and communicative functions of socially structured variation in speech’ (Foulkes et al. 2010: 704). Sociophonetic research shows how nuances of pronunciation are used by speakers to convey social information and by listeners to draw conclusions about the social identity of their interlocutors. Researchers in this field also bring the empirical facts of variation to bear on questions of phonetic and phonological theory, using speech production and perception data to inform accounts of how sounds and words are learned, represented, processed, and linked to social information. The goal of this course is to address key issues in phonetics and phonology by critically reviewing relevant sociophonetic literature, identifying conflicts as well as common threads across this research, sketching the overall picture of the phonological and phonetic system that is implied by this work, and presenting avenues for future research that can fill in the gaps. Topics that will be discussed include contrast & the phonemic inventory, phonotactics and alternations, the perception/production relationship, representations vs processes as the locus of variation, L1 acquisition, and language change.

Sociolinguists of all kinds are interested in stylistic variation and language style – that is, variation within the speech of the individual, and individual ways of using language. Labovians focusing on language change analyze style-shifting to uncover community norms and the motivations for change, while ‘third wave’ scholars view stylistic variation as a means of shaping and presenting dynamic social identity. In this course, we will critically examine a range of approaches to language style, chiefly from the perspective of variationist sociolinguistics, but also drawing on anthropological, ethnographic, interactional sociolinguistic, and corpus linguistic approaches. In the variationist domain, we will grapple with Labov’s Attention to Speech model (1972), Bell’s Audience Design approach (1984), and Eckert’s ‘third wave’ views (e.g. 2012). Along the way, we will also consider LePage-and Tabouret-Keller’s Acts of Identity (1985), style and stance (e.g. Jaffe, ed. 2009; Johnstone 2013, Kiesling 2009), corpus-based approaches to style register and genre (e.g. Biber 2014), style as self-conscious performance (i.e. ‘stylization’; e.g. Coupland 2007), and the acquisition of stylistic variation by children and through the lifespan. Key concepts will be interrogated (e.g. What is ‘indexicality’? What, in fact, is ‘stance’?), and no approach will be safe from critique, including today’s prevailing ‘third wave’ approach to (stylistic) variation. Finally, we consider just how far beyond the linguistic signal linguists can and should go in investigating language style (e.g. clothing, hairstyle; gesture, facial expression, general bodily ‘comportment’, etc.; e.g. Podesva 2016).

Sociolinguists of all kinds are interested in stylistic variation and language style – that is, variation within the speech of the individual, and individual ways of using language. Labovians focusing on language change analyze style-shifting to uncover community norms and the motivations for change, while ‘third wave’ scholars view stylistic variation as a means of shaping and presenting dynamic social identity. In this course, we will critically examine a range of approaches to language style, chiefly from the perspective of variationist sociolinguistics, but also drawing on anthropological, ethnographic, interactional sociolinguistic, and corpus linguistic approaches. In the variationist domain, we will grapple with Labov’s Attention to Speech model (1972), Bell’s Audience Design approach (1984), and Eckert’s ‘third wave’ views (e.g. 2012). Along the way, we will also consider LePage-and Tabouret-Keller’s Acts of Identity (1985), style and stance (e.g. Jaffe, ed. 2009; Johnstone 2013, Kiesling 2009), corpus-based approaches to style register and genre (e.g. Biber 2014), style as self-conscious performance (i.e. ‘stylization’; e.g. Coupland 2007), and the acquisition of stylistic variation by children and through the lifespan. Key concepts will be interrogated (e.g. What is ‘indexicality’? What, in fact, is ‘stance’?), and no approach will be safe from critique, including today’s prevailing ‘third wave’ approach to (stylistic) variation. Finally, we consider just how far beyond the linguistic signal linguists can and should go in investigating language style (e.g. clothing, hairstyle; gesture, facial expression, general bodily ‘comportment’, etc.; e.g. Podesva 2016).

This course will expose students to current research in natural language processing and computational linguistics. Class meetings will consist primarily of student-led reading discussions, supplemented occasionally by lectures or hands-on activities. The subtopics and reading list will be determined at the start of the semester; readings will consist of research papers, advanced tutorials, and/or dissertations. Students enrolled in the LING section will additionally complete a term project related to the material in the course.

Recent years have seen an explosion of computational work on higher level discourse representations, such as entity recognition, mention and coreference resolution and (shallow) discourse parsing. At the same time, the theoretical status of the underlying categories is not well understood, and despite progress, these tasks remain very much unsolved in practice. This graduate level seminar will concentrate on theoretical and practical models representing how discourse unfolds across sentences as it grows. We will explore cohesion in text by means of discourse relations (e.g. expressing causality, contrastivity), the use of recurring referring expressions, such as mentions of people, things and events, and how these are coded during language processing. We will also study multiple levels of discourse processing in terms of information structure, discourse relations and theories about anaphora, including classic theories as Centering Theory and Alternative Semantics, and newly developing ones such as Question Under Discussion (QUD) trees. With these in mind we will look at computational implementations of systems for entity recognition, coreference resolution and discourse parsing and explore their relationship with linguistic theory and textual coherence, including symbolic, neural and prompt-based approaches using LLMs. Over the course of the semester, participants will implement their own project exploring some phenomenon within the domain of discourse processing. Intermediate programming skills (preferably in Python) are required, and a previous computational course such as Intro to NLP (LING-4400 or higher) or Computational Corpus Linguistics (LING-4427) is recommended.

Natural language is an imperfect vehicle for meaning. On the one hand, some expressions can be interpreted in multiple ways; on the other hand, there are often many superficially divergent ways to express very similar meanings. Semantic representations attempt to disentangle these two effects by exposing similarities and differences in how a word or sentence is interpreted. Such representations, and algorithms for working with them, constitute a major research area in natural language processing.This course will examine semantic representations for natural language from a computational/NLP perspective. Through readings, presentations, discussions, and hands-on exercises, we will put a semantic representation under the microscope to assess its strengths and weaknesses. For each representation we will confront questions such as: What aspects of meaning are and are not captured? How well does the representation scale to the large vocabulary of a language? What assumptions does it make about grammar? How language-specific is it? In what ways does it facilitate manual annotation and automatic analysis? What datasets and algorithms have been developed for the representation? What has it been used for? Special emphasis will be placed on three broad-coverage graph-based representations: AMR, UCCA, and FrameNet.

This seminar brings together two divergent perspectives on human language. On one hand, linguistics research seeks to describe the structures that underlie human communication systems, often using formal tools such as grammars and logics. On the other hand, research in computer science, in particular information theory, seeks to discover the optimal way to package and transmit information over a channel. This seminar will focus on the intersection between these two programs: To what extent are human languages optimized for efficient communication? Can structural features of human language, or human linguistic behaviors be analyzed using the toolkit developed for efficient information exchange? Topics covered will include the structure of the lexicon, the relationship between syntactic and statistical dependencies, pragmatic inferences, as well various language-processing phenomena. Students will gain experience reading and presenting research papers in this area, and implementing concepts from information theory in code. Prerequisite knowledge: Students should be proficient in at least one programming language (Python or R), and familiar with basic concepts of probability theory and/or machine learning." to the end of the course description.

This seminar brings together two divergent perspectives on human language. On one hand, linguistics research seeks to describe the structures that underlie human communication systems, often using formal tools such as grammars and logics. On the other hand, research in computer science, in particular information theory, seeks to discover the optimal way to package and transmit information over a channel. This seminar will focus on the intersection between these two programs: To what extent are human languages optimized for efficient communication? Can structural features of human language, or human linguistic behaviors be analyzed using the toolkit developed for efficient information exchange? Topics covered will include the structure of the lexicon, the relationship between syntactic and statistical dependencies, pragmatic inferences, as well various language-processing phenomena. Students will gain experience reading and presenting research papers in this area, and implementing concepts from information theory in code.

Although everything that we do is in some place, we do not often pay explicit attention to that space, how we react concretely to our space and how our interactions are woven together with our physical environment. Even less attention has been paid to how we talk and write about place. Of course there are some registers that focus exactly on space. Examples include registers used by architects, community planners, realtors, travel agents, authors of travel books and of course, more. Likewise, there are texts and speech events that depend on spatial language, for example, giving physical directions (to get someplace or build something). Linguists, psychologists and anthropologists have incorporated space and place into their theories and practices in somewhat different ways. Although we will spend some time on these theories and practices, the main focus of the class is how people talk and write about place, especially communities in the DC area. Discourse to be examined includes (a) texts that appear in communities along with (b) other geosemiotic displays, (c) media about communities (d) residents talking about a place (including but not limited to narratives) and (d) cognitive maps. Of additional interest is the discourse of community change urban/suburban planning, media attention to place, the discursive development of safety and danger, and how oral histories (and key community events) construct different types of place (and people) identities over time. Because of the texts and contexts that we will be examining, the course will also bring together different ways of analyzing discourse, including variationist-like analyses of grammatical and textual ways of speaking. The course thus requires at least one class on Discourse Analysis. Sociolinguistic Fieldwork course is helpful, but not necessary. Finally, there may be some fieldwork. The course should enhance prior fieldwork, but this is not an in-depth fieldwork course.