Languages are rule-governed systems. The rules that interest linguists are not prescriptive ones of the type "don't split infinitives" but are rather the systematic patterns that language speakers unconsciously know as part of their linguistic competence. For example, as a speaker of English you know how to order words in a sentence to convey a particular meaning and how to change that meaning with seemingly subtle changes in pitch; you can appropriately modify your speech for different social situations, and can understand and create novel sentences you've never heard before.

This course in linguistic analysis introduces students to the methods and theoretical principles used by linguists for rendering speakers' implicit knowledge of their language explicit. Drawing on data from English and many other languages of the world, we will investigate the sounds of language, how they are produced and perceived (phonetics), and how they pattern into syllables and words (phonology). We will study processes of word formation (morphology), sentence structure (syntax), and the relation between these structures and the construction of meaning (semantics). We will consider data such as errors children make when acquiring language, language games, historical reconstructions of extinct languages, instrumental measures, and experimental findings. Our goal is to understand the properties shared by all languages as well as the ways in which languages can differ from each other and change, with the broader aim of understanding the formal structure of human language — how language "works".