Courses for Spring 2025
IDS 2291. Language Birth, Language Death. This course explores the origins and characteristics of real and constructed languages (conlangs), such as Esperanto, Na’vi’ and Heptapod B. It also examines the factors leading to language loss and language death, the reasons why we should care, and how language specialists and activists attempt to bring dying languages back to life.
LIN3041. Introduction to Linguistics I. This course examines what is language and introduces phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics.
LIN3042. Introduction to Linguistics II. Pre-requisite: LIN 3041. This course continues what is language, focusing on differences between human language and animal communication, first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and computational linguistics.
LIN4512. Introduction to Syntax. Pre-requisite: LIN 3041. This course examines the structure of sentences. It approaches syntax from the perspective of generative grammar and focuses on central topics in syntactic theory (Phrase Structure, X’-schema, Theta Theory, Case, Movement, and Binding Theory)
LIN4600. Sociolinguistics. Pre-requisite: LIN 3041. This course explores language in its social context. It focuses on the study of language as a means of communication and expression of identity, as the identity of the speaker and the speech community define the choice of the language.
LIN4716. Child Language Acquisition. This course offers an introduction to the study of child language acquisition and development in both the monolingual and bilingual setting. The goal of the course is to better understand the linguistic, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and neuro-linguistic dimensions of language acquisition.
LIN4930. Special Topics: Conversation Analysis. This course provides an overview of the main findings in the field of Conversation Analysis. Students will learn the main concepts and methods to study social interaction.
ITA4930. Special Topics: Historical Romance Linguistics. This course focuses on the interconnectedness of the Romance languages through detailed linguistic analyses of phonological, morphological, and syntactic changes in the development from Latin into various Romance varieties.
SPN4801. Bilingualism in the Spanish-speaking World. This course explores bilingualism with an emphasis on communities in Spain, Spanish America, and the United States.