V61.0001 Language
Jennifer Nycz
Summer 2004
MTWR 4:00PM - 5:35PM
194M 208
Office: 719 Broadway, 4th floor, Rm. 451
Phone: 212-992-8617
E-mail: jennifer.nycz @ nyu.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Description:
All humans use language: we acquire it easily as children, and use it every day without much conscious thought. However, this effortlessness belies the fact that languages show lots of interesting structural complexity. This course is an introduction to Linguistics: the scientific study of language, its structures, and its usage. The course will present methods used in characterizing the sound system of language (phonology), the modification and arrangement of words in well-formed sentences (morphology and syntax), and how language is used to convey meaning (semantics and pragmatics). Other topics to be discussed include dialectology, language acquisition, the relation between language and thought, and language variation and change. This course assumes no previous knowledge of linguistics, and can be used to satisfy the requirement of an introductory course for the Linguistics major.
Required Textbooks (available at the NYU bookstore, Amazon.com, etc.):
- Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. William O'Grady, John Archibald, Mark Aronoff, Janie Rees-Miller (eds). Bedford/St. Martin's, 4th edition (2001)
- The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker. Perennial (2000)
Course Calendar (subject to change; readings & assignments TBA):
Week 1: Words |
|
| M | Why Linguistics? Introduction to the study of language |
| T | The Dictionary in your head the lexicon, morphemes, word structure |
| W | Me fail English? That's unpossible allomorphy, derivational & inflectional morphology |
| R | Those 1,859 Eskimo words for snow language & thought |
Week 2: Phrases & Sentences |
|
| M | This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat… categories, phrase structure, recursion |
| T | The company words keep subcategorization, thematic roles |
| W | Deep structure & Surface structure transformations |
| R | What (almost) all languages have in common Typology and Universals |
Week 3: Meaning, Acquisition |
|
| M | Memorial Day holiday - NO CLASS |
| T | Warm and fuzzy concepts semantics and meaning |
| W | Can you pass the peas? pragmatics, conversational maxims |
| R | Kids say the darnedest things language acquisition |
Week 4: Sounds |
|
| M | Talking Heads introduction to phonetics, speech production |
| T | And you thought English had only 5 vowels…. consonants, vowels, phonetic transcription |
| W | Your lazy/efficient mouth connected speech phenomena |
| R | My mother, the horse: confessions of a tone-deaf Chinese tone, stress, and other suprasegmental phenomena |
Week 5: More Sounds |
|
| M | Clinton deploys vowels to Bosnia phonotactics |
| T | Why Lois Lane should have studied phonology minimal pairs, contrast, allophony |
| W | One of these sounds is not like the others natural classes & features |
| R | The truth about "Cats" and "Dogs" morphophonemics, rules and constraints |
Week 6: Language in Society, Review |
|
| M | Why everybody has an accent except you dialects |
| T | How to make William Safire lose sleep at night variation and change |
| W | Bringing it all together exam review |
| R | FINAL EXAM! |
Last Modified: April 13, 2004