Discussion of nature-nurture debate with specific reference to language acquisition. Pros and cons of Chomsky's Innateness Hypothesis. CA 1.

Effects of geography, society, and politics on language use and variation (sociolinguistics). The geographical spread, growth and death of languages (language ecology). CA 2. CA 4-INT.

Overview of world languages and language families. Typological classifications of linguistic properties: what can we expect in the structure of a language? Unity and diversity of language systems. Mechanisms of language change and variation. CA 2. CA 4.

Special topics taken in a foreign study program. Consent of Department Head or advisor may be required prior to the student's departure.

Credits, prerequisites and hours as determined by the Senate Curricula and Course Committee.

An introduction to the methods and major findings of linguistic research as applied to the sound systems of languages and the structure and meaning of words and sentences. CA 3.

Special topics taken in a foreign study program. Consent of Program Director required, normally to be granted before the student's departure. May count toward the major with consent of the advisor up to a maximum of six credits.

Sociolinguistics, demographics of the Deaf community; study of Deaf subgroups with different sociological, linguistic and cultural backgrounds; sociolinguistic integration of community members with the larger population in their cultural/ethnic community. Knowledge of American Sign Language not required. CA 2. CA 4.

Computational methods in linguistic analysis and natural language processing. Topics include the use of text corpora and other sources of linguistic data; morphological analysis, parsing and language modeling; applications in areas such as information retrieval and machine translation.

Research methods and laboratory techniques for the study of language acquisition and/or sentence processing. Students design and conduct a study using a computer database of child speech.

The analysis of sound patterns in language within a generative framework: distinctive features, segmental and prosodic analysis, word formation, the theory of markedness.

Analysis of the semantics of natural languages in a generative framework: truth conditions, compositionality, quantification.

Analysis of the syntax of natural languages in a generative framework: phrase structure, movement, syntactic operations and dependencies.

The study of language, culture, and their relationship. Topics include the evolution of the human language capacity; the principles of historical language change including reconstruction of Indo-European and Native American language families; writing systems; linguistic forms such as Pidgins and Creoles arising from languages in contact; the interaction between language and political systems, the struggle for human rights, gender, ethnicity, and ethnobiology. CA 2. CA 4-INT.

Hands-on training in the investigation and analysis of an unfamiliar language from scratch through question and answer with a native-speaker linguistic consultant, and in writing scholarly papers documenting the linguistic phenomena that such investigations yield.

Individual research-related work directed by a faculty member.

Special topics taken in a foreign study program. Consent of Department Head required, normally to be granted prior to the student's departure. May count toward the major with the consent of the advisor.

(Also offered as ASLN 3800.) Linguistic analyses of American Sign Language focusing on the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic levels.

Language and cultural models used in the Deaf community. Critical examination of demographic subgroups of the Deaf community and their linguistic background.

Concepts and tools of current syntactic theory. Syntactic features, lexical and functional categories, representation of phrase structure, argument structure, Case, movement, locality.

Special topics taken in a foreign study program. Consent of Program Director required, normally to be granted before the student's departure. May count toward the major with consent of the advisor up to a maximum of six credits.