An introductory course in Linguistics reveals the incredible amount of knowledge each of us has unconsciously acquired about the structure of our native language. It is bound to elicit enormous respect for your own underlying intelligence as a language-learning machine. As infants and very young children, we were able to turn the stream of sounds we were exposed to into an intricate and highly complex system of representations. This internal system accounts for some of the following:

• Why your accent sounds the way it does when you learn French or Korean, and why Japanese native speakers mix up the sounds "r" and "l".
• Why kids make errors such as saying "goed" for "went" and "brang" for "brought" - and why two-year-olds often use the correct verb forms when six-year-olds don't.
• Why "I didn't see no one" is perfectly grammatical in some dialects of English, despite what you might have been told about two negatives making a positive.
• Why you can ask a question such as "Who did Donald claim that Marla was dating?" when it sounds odd to say "Who did Donald make the claim that Marla was dating?"

1. To develop an enjoyment of the intricate complexities of the human mind as manifest in its creation of language.
   
2. To become familiar with the basic concepts used in linguistic analysis, and to develop the skills needed for proposing and defending solutions to characterizing patterns of sound, structure and meaning in selected linguistic data sets.
   
3. To apply skills of linguistic analysis to naturally-occurring data sets. You will learn some techniques for collecting data, organizing it, and using your knowledge of linguistics to generate observations about patterns evident in the data. You will also learn to discuss the limits of proposed solutions in accounting for actual, somewhat messy data.

Here are some of the topics we cover in this class:

1. Phonetics: The sounds of language, and their anatomy
2. Phonology: Sound patterns and sound systems
3. Sound patterns in language change
4. Learning and processing sound patterns
5. Morphology: The structure of English words
6. Morphology: Word formation in other languages
7. Syntax: Basic elements of sentence structure
8. Advanced syntax: Complex syntactic dependencies
9. Learning and processing syntactic structure
10. Semantics: Turning structure into meaning

Class assignments include regular problems sets, many of which are taken from the excellent resource The Language Files, and a collection of quizzes, projects, and a final exam.

Some sample projects:

• Analyzing the accent of a foreign speaker, or the speech patterns of a young child
  Project Guidelines
• Creating an "alien" language
  Project Guidelines