Lecture Slides

Lecture PowerPoint Slides will be posted here regularly for your reference.

Lecture 1 (Part I): Course description, objectives, and requirements (administrative matters)

Lecture 1 (Part II): What is linguistics? What is language?

Lecture 2: Human language design features

Lecture 3: Language and intelligence; language acquisition; critical period?

Lecture 4: Language and the brain

Lecture 5: Poverty of the stimulus argument; Phonetics: Consonants

Lecture 6: Nonpulmonic consonants; Vowels; Phonetic transcription

Lecture 7: Two instances of phonetic variation (in Martha’s Vineyard and in the Northern Cities); Processes of coarticulation

Lecture 8: ‘Everyone has an accent except me;’ structure of syllables; prosodic features

Lecture 9: Phonology: introducing phonemes and allophones; the phonemic analysis algorithm

Lecture 10: Representing phonological knowledge in terms of formal rules

Lecture 11: Introducing morphology

Lecture 12: Morphology problems; word-formation processes; morphological typology

Lecture 13: Morphological typology cont., intro to syntax

Lecture 14: Syntax cont.: Constituency; heads and complements; syntactic categories; representing syntactic structure in trees; resolving recursiveness and ambiguity.

Lecture 15: Transformations; Parameters

Lecture 16: Sociolinguistics: Dialectal variation and studying language attitudes

Lecture 17: Sociolinguistics: Language and ethnicity: The case of African American English

Lecture 18: Guest Lecture by Prof. Gustavo Freire on ‘Investigating Events and Propositions in Child Language.’

Lecture 19: Presentations from Language Myths.

Lecture 20: Language change: lexical, semantic, morphological, and phonological.

Lecture 21:Language change cont.: syntactic change; Reconstruction and Proto-Indo-European.

Lecture 22:Reconstruction cont.; Pidgins and creoles

Lecture 23: Pidgins and creoles cont.; language and thought revisited.