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Transfer Student Courses in LinguisticsThis page was created at 7:17 PM on Mon, Jan 21, 2002. Winter Academic Term, 2002 (January 7 - April 26)Open courses in Linguistics Wolverine Access Subject listing for LING Winter Academic Term '02 Time Schedule for Linguistics.
LING 210. Introduction to Linguistic Analysis.
Section 001.Instructor(s): John M Lawler (jlawler@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: (4). (SS). Credits: (4). Course Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/210.html Edward Sapir said: "Everything that we have so far seen to be true of language points to the fact that it is the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has evolved – nothing short of a finished form of expression for all communicable experience. This form may be endlessly varied by the individual without thereby losing its distinctive contours; and it is constantly reshaping itself as is all art. Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations." At about the same time (circa 1920), Krazy Kat said:
True, all true. As Krazy suggests, this "massive and inclusive art" is also the information bottleneck of the human condition. A vast amount of our knowledge, including virtually everything we learn in formal education, comes to us through Language. Consequently, learning to analyze language, in ways that work for all languages, and to describe it objectively, is an indispensable tool for intellectuals, and one that stimulates in addition the habit of close attention to language, which is one of the things necessary for effective writing, not to mention clear thinking. Further, an understanding of how language really works (in contrast to the linguistic mythologies usually taught in schools) gives one a metaphorical place to stand that facilitates the study of anything that is described in language, which means just about everything. Over the last century, linguistic scientists have amassed an array of analytic procedures, concepts, and findings that allow one to de-mystify speech, grammar, and language use, and to discover a number of surprising facts about one's own and others' languages. This course is a medium-sized (maximum 60) 4-credit intensive introduction to the methods linguists use for describing languages (although general training in analytic thought is our ultimate goal). Drawing on examples from a large number of the world's languages, we will devote about two weeks to each of the major areas of linguistic analysis, in order:
By focusing simultaneously on language data, and on the techniques used to make sense of these data, we will see that our understanding of the object of inquiry (language) is influenced by our methods of inquiry. There will be frequent quizzes and daily data analysis problems, which will form the context for our discussion. In addition, there will be comprehensive midterm and final take-home exams, which may be done in groups. This course is especially recommended for those with interests in scientific analysis (including mathematics, computing, and engineering), since the analytic methods discussed are generalizable easily. There is no textbook; materials for analysis and handouts are in a course pack. Students who would like a textbook to study should invest in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, available at all local bookstores. No prerequisites except an interest in language and thinking.
LING 272 / ANTHRCUL 272. Language in Society.
Section 001.Instructor(s): J DickinsonPrerequisites & Distribution: Primarily for first- and second-year students. (4). (SS). (R&E).
Credits: (4; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No homepage submitted. See Cultural Anthropology 272.001.
LING 313. Sound Patterns.
Section 001.Instructor(s): Patrice Speeter Beddor (beddor@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: Ling. 210 or 211. (3). (SS). Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No homepage submitted. This course explores two fundamental aspects of the sounds of human languages: speech sounds as physical entities (phonetics) and speech sounds as linguistic units (phonology). In viewing sounds as physical elements, the focus is articulatory descriptions: How are speech sounds made? What types of articulatory movements and configurations are used to differentiate sounds in the world's languages? In this part of the course, the goal is to learn to produce, transcribe, and describe in articulatory terms many of the sounds known to occur in human languages. In the next part of the course, the focus is on sounds as members of a particular linguistic system. Phonological data from a wide range of languages are analyzed – that is, regularities or patterns in sound distribution are extracted from the data set and then stated within a formal phonological framework. We also will construct arguments to support the proposed analyses, and will find that phonetic factors play a crucial role in validating phonological analyses. Throughout the course, a major emphasis is that speech sounds are simultaneously physical and linguistic elements, and that these two aspects of sound structure are interdependent. Class sessions will consist of lectures/labs, phonetic practice, and interactive discussions of phonological data sets.
LING 315. Introduction to Syntax.
Section 001.Instructor(s): Mark Hale (markhale@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: Ling. 210 or 211. (3). (Excl). Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No homepage submitted. This course introduces the foundations of generative syntactic inquiry. Students will learn how formal syntactic analyses of certain aspects of English syntax are constructed, as well as about the ways that human languages are the same (rather than about how they may appear to differ). Through this course, students will become familiar with questions concerning cognitive capacities, mind vs. brain, knowledge vs. behavior, and the difference between studying "languages" vs. investigating human cognitive capacities (such as the human capacity to acquire natural language systems). Requirements include regular, short written assignments, a midterm, and a final.
LING 317. Language and History.
Section 001.Instructor(s): William H Baxter (wbaxter@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: Ling. 210 or 211. (3). (HU). Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No homepage submitted. Languages enable us to record history, but languages themselves are also products of history, and of prehistory. Many clues about the past are to be found in the vocabulary and structure of individual languages. Much can also be deduced from how languages are distributed in space, and how they are related to each other. Through readings and hands-on exercises, this course will introduce students to the basic methods of historical linguistics (including reconstruction of extinct languages, dialect geography, and mathematical methods), and apply them to examples drawn from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, including areas of current research and controversy.
LING 318. Types of Languages.
Section 001 – Meets with Linguistics 518.001.Instructor(s): Peter E Hook (pehook@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: Ling. 210 or 211. No credit granted to those who have completed or are enrolled in Ling. 518. (3). (Excl). Credits: (3). Course Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pehook/lingw97.html Human languages, especially those spoken by members of unfamiliar and distant cultures, appear on the surface to be very different from one another. But closer examination reveals that languages differ in systematic ways and that more than half of them can be divided into a relatively small number of basic types. In this course we will identify and study some of these basic patterns and explore possible reasons for their existence, seeking explanations where possible in the communicative function of language as well as in the historical evolution of languages. The course will introduce students to basic grammatical structure and function by (1) having them investigate unfamiliar languages through study of published descriptive grammars and (2) relating this direct experience to the principle findings of contemporary typological research. Coursework will consist of:
Toward the end of the course students will make a ten minute oral presentation to the class of a pre-final version of their term papers.
LING 319. Discourse in the Academic Disciplines.
Section 001 – Meets with College Honors 250.001.Instructor(s): John Malcolm Swales (jmswales@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: Ling. 210 recommended. (3). (HU). Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No homepage submitted. In this course, we will explore many aspects of academic discourse including "going behind the scenes" to see how experts write and read research and scholarly genres. In so doing, we will be using various methodologies such as discourse analysis, quantitative studies of grammatical structures and lexical items, observations, and corpus linguistics and concordancing. There will also be three "field trips" to "out of the way" academic units on campus. Our combined investigations should help us answer better such questions as:
As a result of these investigations, participants will be able to raise their own awareness of academic writing and speaking, and hence improve their own performances in these areas.
LING 408 / ENGLISH 408. Varieties of English.
Section 001.Instructor(s): Thomas E Toon (ttoon@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (Excl). Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No homepage submitted.
LING 461 / ANTHRCUL 461 / AMCULT 461. Language, Culture, and Society in Native North America.
Section 001.Instructor(s): Barbra A Meek (bameek@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (Excl). Credits: (3). Course Homepage: No homepage submitted. See Cultural Anthropology 461.001.
LING 492. Topics in Linguistics.
Section 002 – Montana Salish. Meets with Ling 792.002.Instructor(s): Sarah G Thomason (thomason@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (Excl). May be elected for credit twice. Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No homepage submitted. This seminar focuses on Montana Salish, one of about two dozen languages of the Salishan language family of the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana). These languages, all of them gravely endangered, have structural features that are unusual in the world's languages, notably consonant clusters as long as eight consonants, pharyngeal consonants, lexical suffixes, very elaborate verbal morphology, and a weak lexical distinction between nouns and verbs. The course will begin with introductory lectures on the phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax of Montana Salish, and continue with translation and analysis of texts. Students, working either alone or in groups, will prepare a term paper on some aspect of Salish structure. The term paper will count for half of the course grade; the other half of the grade will be based on active participation in class discussions, including in-class presentations on students' research projects. Ideally, the students in this seminar will have had at least one course in phonetics or phonology and one course in syntax; interested students without this background should consult the instructor before enrolling. There is no textbook for the course. Assigned readings will include the instructor's draft grammar lessons and articles from the scholarly literature on this and other Salishan languages.
LING 492. Topics in Linguistics.
Section 003 – Introduction to Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP).Instructor(s): Acrisio M Pires (pires@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (Excl). May be elected for credit twice. Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No homepage submitted. In an age when computers and the Internet have made their way into daily life, there is a large demand for tools to make that daily interaction as simple and efficient as possible. That is one of the goals of Computational Linguistics, a field that covers any computational approaches to linguistics and language research, both from a theoretical and from an application viewpoint. More specifically, the term Computational Linguistics is often used interchangeably with Natural Language Processing (NLP), its major area of application. NLP corresponds to the design of artificial mechanisms or machinery to manipulate human language on an automatic basis or, more often, to be used as more natural and efficient interfaces between humans and computers. This course has two components: (i) it covers NLP research in the areas of morphology, syntax, semantics, and the lexicon; (ii) it provides a short introduction to programming, with assignments directed to NLP. Some topics the students will become familiar with are finite state automata and regular expressions, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, context-free grammars, tools for sentence parsing, semantic analysis, and unification. The course also introduces natural language applications in information extraction/retrieval and machine translation. This can be taken as a beginning course in the field, but it is also useful for students who want to be able to use computers to manipulate human language as their object of study in different fields. No pre-requisites necessary, although students who have not taken any linguistics courses are encouraged to take at least a 200-level course concurrently (this can be discussed with the instructor, email pires@umich.edu). Coursebook: Jurafsky, D. and J. H. Martin. 2000. Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
LING 492. Topics in Linguistics.
Section 005 – Language & Socialization. Meets with Anthro 458.002, Psych 551.244, and Ling 792.005.Instructor(s): Barbara A Meek (bameek@umich.edu) , Marilyn J Shatz (mshatz@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (Excl). May be elected for credit twice. Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No homepage submitted. See Cultural Anthropology 458.002.
LING 492. Topics in Linguistics.
Section 007 – Language variation in translation: American films dubbed into German. Meets with German 499.002Instructor(s): Robin M Queen (rqueen@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: (3). (Excl). May be elected for credit twice. Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No homepage submitted.
LING 513. Phonology.
Section 001.Instructor(s): San Duanmu (duanmu@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: Ling. 313. (3). (Excl). Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No homepage submitted. Phonology studies the sound system of human languages. This course introduces the fundamental concepts in phonology. Topics include distinctive features, phonological rules, prosodic structure (syllable, stress, tone, intonation), multi-tiered phonology, feature geometry, underspecification, and Optimality Theory. Both theory and problem-solving ability will be emphasized. Besides readings for class, weekly exercises constitute an important part of the course. In addition, there is a final project on a selected topic. Prerequisite: Linguistics 313 or 512, or permission of the instructor. Requirements:
The final project can be on any phonological topic of your own choice. The topic should be selected at least four weeks before the end of classes. An abstract is due at least two weeks before the end of classes. Every student is expected to give a short presentation (10 minutes or so) of your final project towards the end of the course. All assignments should be handed in on time; late ones will either get a lower grade or no grade. Textbooks:
LING 514. Semantics and Pragmatics.
Section 001.Instructor(s): Peter Hallman (hallman@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: Ling. 314. (3). (Excl). Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No homepage submitted. This course introduces three tools for semantic analysis, their relation to current issues in semantic theory, and their relation to an overall picture of what meaning is and how it is encoded in natural language. The three tools are: predicate and propositional logic, generalized quantifier theory, and type theory. These tools are couched in the truth-functional approach to what meaning is, according to which language is basically classificational – linguistic expressions (words, predicates, sentences) serve to classify reality into what is the case and what isn't the case. With these tools, we will explore current issues in semantics including the relation between syntax and semantics (compositionality), the scope of quantifiers, quantifier types, monotonicity, conservativity, presuppositionality, intensionality, event types, and types of anaphora. Textbook: Introduction to Natural Language Semantics by Henriette de Swart. CSLI Publications, Stanford, California, 1998. ISBN 1-57586-138-0.
LING 518. Linguistic Typology.
Section 001 – Meets with Linguistics 318.001.Instructor(s): Peter E Hook (pehook@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: Graduate standing; undergraduates with permission of department. No credit granted to those who have completed or are enrolled in Ling. 318. (3). (Excl). Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pehook/lingw97.html Human languages, especially those spoken by members of unfamiliar and distant cultures, appear on the surface to be very different from one another. But closer examination reveals that languages differ in systematic ways and that more than half of them can be divided into a relatively small number of basic types. In this course we will identify and study some of these basic patterns and explore possible reasons for their existence, seeking explanations where possible in the communicative function of language as well as in the historical evolution of languages. The course will introduce students to basic grammatical structure and function by (1) having them investigate unfamiliar languages through study of published descriptive grammars and (2) relating this direct experience to the principle findings of contemporary typological research. Coursework will consist of:
Toward the end of the course students will make a ten minute oral presentation to the class of a pre-final version of their term papers.
LING 542 / ANTHRCUL 572. Introduction to Sociolinguistics.
Section 001.Instructor(s): Ann Lesley Milroy (amilroy@umich.edu)Prerequisites & Distribution: Ling. 514 or graduate standing. (3). (Excl). Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term). Course Homepage: No homepage submitted. Students will be introduced to methods of studying the relationships between language variation and social structure and to the major findings of sociolinguists who have examined these relationships. The course will focus largely (but not exclusively) on the quantitative methods developed by Labov, which are designed to reveal the way language change is rooted in synchronic variation. Socially sensitive models of language change will be considered. The course will study reports of research which focus variously on everyday social interaction, on larger scale patterns of social dialect variation, and on patterns of code choice in bidialectal and bilingual communities. Relationships between language and social class, language and gender, and language and ethnicity will be discussed. Others topics covered will be language and style and larger scale social, educational, and political issues associated with the process of language standardization. All students will carry out a small-scale piece of original sociolinguistic research and will be offered the opportunity to contribute to projects currently in progress in Detroit area speech communities.
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