Class is officially over. All links have been deactivated.
On this page you will find the PowerPoint slides for the lectures posted in .pdf format. They will be posted here after every class for your reference.
Lecture 1: Introduction to linguistic theory.
Lecture 2: Articulatory phonetics.
Lecture 3: Language vs. dialect. Introducing morphology.
Lecture 4: Taxonomy of morphemes. Exercises on morphological analysis.
Lecture 5: Discussion on language endangerment. Approaches to word knowledge representation in the mental lexicon.
Lecture 6: Morphological structure trees. Compounding, conversion, and a few other word-formation processes.
Lecture 7: Key issues in the study of African American Language. Word-formation processes cont. An exercise on word formation in English. Morphology exercises.
Lecture 8: Productivity and creativity. Inflection. Inflectional morphology exercises.
Lecture 9: Inflection cont. Allomorphy.
Lecture 10: Allomorphy exercises. Morphological typology. A note on blocking.
Lecture 11: Intro to syntax.
Lecture 12: Syntactic categories (aka parts of speech)
Lecture 13: Constituency. Phrase structure rules. Syntactic trees.
Lecture 14: Grammatical diversity in the English of North America. Phrase structure grammar cont.
Lecture 15: Garden path sentences. Tree-geometric relations. Introducing X-bar Theory.
Lecture 16: X-bar Theory cont.
Lecture 17: Variation in basic word order: Head directionality in English vs Japanese.
Lecture 18: Word order variation cont. Also, Mohawk polysynthesis.
Lecture 19: Four topics of syntactic typology.
Lecture 20: The syntax of wh-questions (including islands). Historical linguistics and comparative reconstruction.
Lecture 21: No class. Preparations for presentations.
Lecture 22: Group presentations #1.
Lecture 23: Group presentations #2.
Lecture 24: A few more parameters. Final thoughts on linguistic diversity.