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Winter 2002
This information effective for Winter 2002.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
Winter 2002
Instructor: Judith Aissen
E-mail: aissen@cats.ucsc.edu
MWF 9:30–10:40 a.m.
Crown 208
This course is a general introduction to the nature of language, its complexity and its diversity. The first part of the course will focus on the core areas of language study: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The second part of the course will focus on issues in language and society. These may include such topics as dialects, American Sign Language, the acquisition of language, and the official English language movement. By the end of the course you should be acquainted with systematic methods of studying language, be aware of the fundamental similarities of all human languages as well as their startling diversity, and have an informed perspective on how issues of language impact our society. This course does not satisfy any named requirement for the Linguistics major. Course requirements: class participation, weekly home-work assignments, a midterm, and a final exam.
Prerequisites: none.
General Education Code: IH.
Instructor: Jorge Hankamer
E-mail: hank@ling.ucsc.edu
MWF 9:30–10:40 a.m.
Cowell 134
This course is an introduction to English syntax (principles of sentence construction) and to syntactic analysis in the framework of generative grammar. It constitutes the entry course to the syntax sequence for linguistic majors. No prior linguistic or other training is presupposed. The work for the course consists entirely of homework problems. An assignment will be given at every class, due at the following class, and returned the class after that. The homework will require time and careful attention, and will usually be rather challenging. These problems will be designed to involve students in observation and analysis of linguistic data, and in the construction and testing of syntactic theories. At two times during the quarter, the problems will be more comprehensive and time-consuming, and will function as take-home exams. There is no text. Though it is part of the required core sequence for linguistics majors, Syntax I is designed for all students interested in an introduction to a rigorous, scientific approach to language study, a better understanding of the structure of English and of language in general, or just plenty of exercise in precise thought and writing.
Prerequisites: Satisfaction of the Subject ‘A’ and ‘C’
requirements.
General Education Codes: IH (Introduction to Humanities), W (Writing Intensive).
Instructor: Donka Farkas
E-mail: farkas@ling.ucsc.edu
MWF 2:00–3:10 p.m.
Stevenson 175
This course is an introduction to the study of linguistic meaning and its role in communication through language. The study of meaning in language covers a wide range of topics, ranging from the connection between an individual’s use of language and his or her cultural knowledge and particular beliefs to the investigation of the principles which explain the meaning of a sentence based upon the meaning of its component words. Semantics, narrowly construed, studies the representation of lexical (word) meaning and compositional (sentence) meaning. The study of the interpretation of language use in context is often termed pragmatics. This course deals with both areas. Topics to be covered: the relationship between the meaning of a sentence and one’s understanding of an utterance; working out the implications of what is said; the complex meanings of some small words; how the meaning of a sentence is based on the meaning of its parts. Work for the course includes reading approximately four papers and submitting answers to weekly problem sets and a final essay. The course will have once-a-week discussion sections.
Prerequisites: none.
General Education Code: IH (Introduction to Humanities).
Instructor: Geoffrey K. Pullum, Professor of Linguistics
E-mail: pullum@cats.ucsc.edu
MWF 12:30–1:40 p.m.
Classroom Unit I
General Overview and Purpose of the Course
What’s it about?
This course used to be called “The Nature and Language of Computers,” and was once a second-level core course for Cowell. Its content has not radically changed, but its new name, “Introduction to Unix,” reflects its orientation much better. And its new joint homes in the departments of Linguistics and Computer Science are the right ones, because this is a course not just about computing machines but about language and culture. It is not exactly linguistics, or computer science, and yet in a way it’s both. The main focus is on developing a literate understanding of one particular language for communicating with computers.
The course is focused not on IBM-compatible PCs or the Macintosh, but on teaching the fundamentals of how to use the command language and tools that come with a very widely used operating system called Unix.
What’s Unix?
Unix is the operating system for most of the machines used for really serious work by experts in fields like software development, film special effects, running server machines for Internet service providers, and so on. This includes the campus time-sharing machines for students to log in on, specifically teach.ucsc.edu and learn.ucsc.edu, and also siamese.ucsc.edu, plus all the Sun Microsystems workstations in the computer labs.
Unix was developed originally for machines that were considered very powerful for their time, especially for powerful machines designed to serve many users simultaneously; but it is turning up increasingly on individual-use microcomputers, even small notebook computers. It is constantly spreading to new sites and new machines, and it now seems clear that it will be important for decades, way into the next century (and millennium).
Unix is generally thought of as being for experts only, but the people who say that are wrong! Anyone with enough intelligence and commitment to be working toward a college degree can come to understand how to use Unix very effectively indeed. This course teaches Unix in a nontechnical way to students who may have no previous experience of computer use—and to teach it rather in the way that foreign languages and cultures are taught, through examples and practice and careful and analytical explanation when troublesome points are reached.
What about Linux?
Linux is an operating system developed by a worldwide movement to make high-quality free software available to everyone. It behaves exactly like Unix, but is completely outside corporate control, and is not copyrighted. Everything about Linux is public, even the source code of the programs that shows you exactly how they work. This has led to an unparalleled degree of robustness, reliability, and security: any time some tiny fault is discovered, everyone can learn about it, every programmer in the world can read the code and see where the problem is, anyone who wants can propose a fix or an improvement, and when an improved version is decided upon and released, it is free, so everyone can obtain it and use it, and it is public, so everyone can see what was fixed and how it works.
The relation to the material in this course is simple: if you know what this course teaches, you can use Linux. In fact with a little initial assistance from the local Linux Users’ Group, SLUGLUG, you can probably install Linux on your own computer and never use anything else. Although the machines provided for your use to do assignments in this course are not running Linux, the differences are few and easy to get used to. It is like learning to drive a Camaro and then being given a free Corvette. At the worst, it is like learning Brazilian Portuguese and then moving to Portugal.
What prior experience is assumed?
The level really is introductory. If you are already browsing directory structures and customizing your .cshrc and maintaining a web page, it’s not for you; it’ll be familiar stuff, you’ll hate yourself, you’ll get bored, you’ll get drunk instead of doing an assignment, and then you’ll fail for being flaky. Go away. Don’t take this course if you know Unix reasonably well. This course is going to be taught on the assumption that you don’t know about such things. You will be expected to work seriously at understanding the material, but you will not be expected to be some kind of geek!
So if you have no idea what a .cshrc is, but are prepared to learn interesting things if there is some serious point to them, then this course might well be just right for you. If you’re not sure, call me (9-4705), or stop by (Stevenson Academic building, office 265), or e-mail me (pullum@ling.ucsc.edu), and we’ll discuss it.
What’s the aim?
One of the things this course attempts to do is to liberate people from the infantilizing influence of Windows. Windows is carefully designed to keep you ignorant and powerless. Windows wants you to click when told to and be shown pictures; you’re supposed to be obedient and have very little grasp of what goes on back there in the box as a result of your clicking. If things come when you click for them, fair enough, but if anything goes wrong it is utterly baffling, and there is little opportunity to delve, explore, understand, and set things right. Often you reboot the machine to get things working again, and you never know why. It is like driving an automatic-transmission, power-steering, electronic-fuel-injection car with the hood welded shut: you hope it runs, but if something goes wrong there is no realistic hope that you can figure out what’s wrong and work on them yourself. (Actually, Windows crashes so often that it’s more like a car that hurls itself off the highway into a ditch several times a week and has to be completely replaced.)
Unix allows you to figure things out and fix and customize things—without you having to become an engineer. Unix doesn’t just show you a menu and tell you to order from it; it lets you in the kitchen and enables you to critically inspect the implements and ingredients, and lets you see how to cook things. If you want a better understanding of what actually goes on when you access the Internet, a chance to put your own home page on the World Wide Web and understand what you’ve done, and make computers do complex things at your command without ever having to turn into a programmer or employ a programmer, LING/CMPS 80G is just right for you.
Not a snooze
It is rather important that I should warn you that this is not a snooze-through course. Certainly, it is a fairly straightforward and interesting way of getting five credits, but it’s not a falling-off-a-log no-requirements easy way. Plenty of people do fail this course. But they really bring it on themselves: they goof off, they ignore assignments, they fail to show up for quizzes. To pass this course you have make regular use of the Unix system, stay in touch with your TA, attend lectures, turn in assignments, pass tests and exams (roughly one a week), and do a bit of hard thinking.
Of course, language learning is always like this. You cannot just learn up facts for the final and leave it at that in a language course. You have to exert yourself, use the language, interact, make mistakes, get involved, and try to incorporate it into your behavioral repertoire. If you won’t, then a language course is close to useless to you. You cannot possibly become a French speaker by refusing to participate in class, avoiding French people, and doing a little night-before cramming to squeak a pass in quizzes. You don’t even start to be a French speaker until you get out there and embarrass yourself in conversation with French people. You have to make mistakes, recover from them, keep on trying to get communication going in French, and ultimately make French forms of expression a part of your life. It changes you.
It’ll be the same with Unix. You don’t even start to be a Unix user until you log in every day, try things out, use the reference books, and exert yourself to see what you can accomplish. If you do this course in a minimalist way, it will be of little value. If you do it in a whole-hearted way, it will start to be fun, and it will be of permanent value.
What’s the practical use?
What value is it? This is the only course I am aware of on this campus that is definitely known to have contributed in a significant way to one of its alumni winning an Oscar and another winning a Supreme Court case. One early alumnus of this course went to work for Industrial Light and Magic, where they gave him a job because he was able to answer a truthful “Yes” to the question about whether he could handle a powerful Unix-based workstation. He ended up being a co-recipient of the Oscar for the special effects in the film Forrest Gump. Another alumnus of this course went on to work as a lawyer, and was involved in a computer language copyright infringement case where he represented a little local good-guy company that had been sued by a Big Evil Company. The case was appealed by the Big Evil Company up to the Supreme Court of the United States, and when they refused to overrule the lower appeals court, the good guys won.
But whether you end up doing intellectual property law or film special effects or typesetting or computational linguistics or particle physics or web page design or something completely different, this course will help you to become expert—more than usually expert—with computers. It will have real effects on your future employability for almost anything.
What topics are covered?
Registering for an Athena computer account; the language of the C shell command interpreter csh (`Cshellese'); mail programs; the Internet (and to some extent the World Wide Web); file management (ls, mv, cp, rm, ftp, . . .); directory structures (cd, pwd, mkdir, . . .); text formatters; utilities for searching, sifting, and sorting text (sed, tr, sort, the grep family, etc.); pipelines; variables; control structures (if, while, foreach); and writing simple interactive shell scripts. (If a lot of this looks like Greek to you, that is fine. No prior experience required. But in three months you will know something about all of the above.)
What requirements does it satisfy?
LING 80G/CMPS 80G satisfies a T2 (Natural Sciences) general education requirement. It is tailor-made to satisfy computing graduation requirements like the one for Cowell students or the one set by the Economics department. It was developed for such purposes. It may also serve as a useful preliminary course for people who would like to enter the Computer and Science or Computer Engineering departments in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering.
What other courses is this one most similar to?
There are no courses quite like this one. Some courses don’t get to anything as advanced or supposedly difficult as Unix; others presuppose that you’ve somehow already picked up Unix on the street; but this one actually teaches Unix in an easy-to-understand way. That’s unique. Much of it deals with text handling—reading and writing and finding and sending and editing and formatting and scanning and searching and modifying and chopping and sorting and polishing and printing and publishing ordinary natural language text like stories and poems and essays and novels and letters and electronic mail messages. It’s a course for readers and writers and all kinds of intelligent non-geekoid people.
You are welcome to read the reviews of previous years’ offerings of this course, which are available for your perusal at the Department of Linguistics office. You could even read reviews of the ancestor course, Cowell 80G, at the Cowell College Provost’s Office. Or just ask around in the neighbourhood; lots of smart people have taken this course.
Instructor: Nathan Sanders
E-mail: sanders@ling.ucsc.edu
MWF 11:00–12:10 p.m.
Cowell 134
Phonetics and phonology are the two branches of linguistics that deal with sound structure. While phonetics focuses on the physical manifestations of sounds and on theories of speech production and perception, phonology is concerned with the systems of rules that determine how the basic sounds of a language combine. We will begin by discussing the internal structure of sounds and developing a precise formalism (the distinctive feature system) for representing this internal structure. We will then consider the kinds of systematic regularities in sound-combination that motivate phonological rules. The rest of the course will be devoted to three fundamental questions that can be raised about phonological rules: What is the form of these rules? How do they interact with one another? And what are the properties of the representations to which they apply? Because phonological rules can depend on word structure, any rigorous investigation of phonology inevitably touches on this area as well. Thus, this course also constitutes an introduction to morphology (word structure). Course requirements: Weekly problems, midterm, and final exam.
Prerequisite: Satisfaction of the Subject ‘A’ and ‘C’ requirements;
Phonetics (LING 51), or Intro. to Linguistics (LING 20).
General Education Code: W (Writing Intensive).
Instructor: Caro Struijke
E-mail: struijke@ling.ucsc.edu
MWF 11:00–12:10 p.m.
Merrill 2
A sequel to Phonology I, this course is an introduction to metrical and autosegmental phonology. Phonological description and analysis of linguistic data will continue to be the core of the course, but we will also be investigating some basic questions regarding the adequacy of the theory and the formalism employed. Course requirements: Weekly problem sets, midterm, and final.
Prerequisite: Phonology I (LING 101).
Instructor: Sandra Chung
E-mail: schung@cats.ucsc.edu
MWF 9:30–10:40 a.m.
Crown 202
Linguistics 113 continues the investigation of generative/transformational grammar begun in Syntax I. Several new constructions of English grammar are introduced: constituent questions, relative clauses, topic and focus constructions. We first investigate the basic properties of these constructions and then go on to examine the constraints on their formation. These constraints will lead us ultimately to a version of generative syntax in which there are no construction-specific transformation rules. As in Syntax I, the course is driven principally by class discussion and by the homework assignments. The course requirements include: 1–2 homeworks per week, a take-home midterm, occasional reading, and a final squib (5–10 page paper). At the end of this course, you should be in a position to read much of the classic work in transformational syntax. You will also be familiar with some important assumptions made in more recent syntactic theory. Your control of argumentation and analysis will be stronger, and you will be able to carry out syntactic investigation of your own. Overall, this course rounds out your understanding of syntactic structure, completing the picture introduced in Syntax I.
Prerequisites: Satisfaction of the Subject ‘A’ and ‘C’
requirements; Ling 52 (Syntax I).
General Education Code: W (Writing Intensive).
Instructor: Jorge Hankamer
E-mail: hank@ling.ucsc.edu
TTH 2:00–3:45 p.m.
Crown 202
This course will address a particular problem in language engineering, chosen for its practical and theoretical interest and its tractability. The entire course will focus on a team project to design a solution to the problem. Students must enroll for this course for both quarters (Winter and Spring 2002) to receive full credit (6.0 units).
Prerequisite: Interview only; see department adviser.