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Winter 2003
This information effective for Winter 2003. Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
Linguistics
[LING-052] [LING-053] [LING-080C] [LING-080G] [LING-088B] [LING-101] [LING-102] [LING-113] [LING-123] [LING-187]
52. Syntax I
MWF
2:00–3:10pm
Cowell 134
Instructor: Judith Aissen
E-mail: aissen@ucsc.edu
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).
53.
Semantics I
MWF
9:30–10:40am
Thimann 1
Instructor: William Ladusaw
E-mail: ladusaw@ucsc.edu
This
course is an introduction to linguistic meaning and interpretation. It
covers both semantics, the meaning of words and sentences, and
pragmatics, the how language is used and understood.
The
course investigates the nature of our intuitions about meaning, analyzing
them in terms of the role they play in communication and inference through
language.
The
required written work consists of weekly problem sets, two of which will
count as midterms, and a final exam.
The
course is a requirement for students in Linguistics and Language Studies.
It should also be of interest to students in Anthropology, Literature,
Psychology, and Philosophy, students bound for Law School, as well as
Computer Science and Engineering students interested in natural language
processing.
No
previous work in linguistics is presupposed
Prerequisites:
none.
General Education Code: IH (Introduction to Humanities).
80C.
Language, Society, and Culture
TTH
4:00–5:45pm
Kresge 327
Instructor: Jaye Padgett
Office: 253 Stevenson
Phone: 459-3157
Office hours: TBA
email: padgett@ucsc.edu
Syllabus
Required Text: LING 80C reader, available at Bay Tree Bookstore
Requirements:
- All assigned
readings
- 4 papers
(some possibly revised)
- Attendance
and engagement in the class
About
the class: As
the title suggests, this course introduces students to a range of topics
involving the sociology, culture, and politics of language. (See the more
detailed discussion of topics below.) It is a lecture-style course, but
with significant discussion mixed in.
Readings:
Most of these will come from the Ling 80C reader, though I may give
out things or ask you to visit the McHenry reserves. You'll get much less
out of this course and have a hard time writing effective papers if you
don't do the reading.
Papers
You
will be asked to write 4 papers, in each case choosing a topic from within
one of the 8 Subject Areas covered by this course. (See below.)
It is up to you which Subject Area you write in, except for the following:
two papers must be written in Subject Areas I-IV, the other two in V-VIII.
Papers in a given Subject Area will be due shortly after we cover that
area in class.
In
addition, everyone will have the option of revising each paper based on
our feedback and turning it in for a second evaluation. The point of this
is to help you improve your writing skills. Papers that are not well enough
done, earning less than the equivalent of a B, must be redone.
I
will give out lists of paper topics for each Subject Area during the quarter.
You can also choose your own topic, but only if you get it approved by
me at least a week before the paper is due.
The purpose of the papers is to have you think critically about what you have read and about what has been happening in class. When writing assignments, then, you should first try to make it clear that you know the relevant reading and know what has happened in class. (See Attendance below.) You should go beyond this, however, for example, drawing on your own experience, extending the ideas to new domains, or responding critically.
Given the topics we will discuss, it is very tempting to fall into the trap of making assertions that aren't supported, relying on feeling more than reason, and sloganeering or depending on easy rhetoric. Please make every effort instead to focus your thinking, make your reasoning clear, and argue for what you say.
Papers
should be no shorter than 5 pages, and no longer than 10. This assumes
a word count of at least 200 words per page. In order to help us read
them and comment on them, please follow these guidelines: papers should
be written on one side of the page only, double spaced, and with one-inch
margins. They can be typed or handwritten, so long as they are neat and
easily legible. Please staple all pages together.
Papers
can be turned in late if, and only if, you contact us in advance
with a reasonable request and make a specific arrangement.
Attendance
Your
engagement in the readings and in class are important to the success of
the class. Therefore, regular attendance and engagement in class/readings
are a significant factor in your overall evaluation. "Engagement"
does not mean that you must talk in class, though I certainly hope you
do. You can demonstrate engagement in other ways, for instance, during
office hour discussions and, most importantly, in your written work.
Course
Subject Areas
I.
Good language and bad language
The
idea that there are correct ways to speak or write and incorrect ways
runs deep, and it can have serious consequences for people. Where does
this idea come from? What does it mean? What are its consequences? What
is "Standard English"? How else, if not by enforcing a language
standard, do countries cope with dialectal variation?
II.
Dialects
Dialects
are a fact of life and always have been, as is linguistic variation and
change. What are dialects, and where do they come from? Dialects, linguistic
variation, and patterns of speech all have a lot to do with social class,
ethnicity, gender, age, and, in general, group affiliation. Why should
this be?
III.
Linguistic relativity, Newspeak, and verbal hygiene
There
is a popular idea that patterns of thought are determined in part by one's
language. (For example, "French is the language of reason";
"Speakers of Hopi have no conception of time"; "Eskimos
have 100 words for snow.") Is this true? In addition, many groups
attempt to capitalize on this idea by controlling or manipulating the
language they/we use in order to control the way others think.
IV.
Bilingualism, Multilingualism, Official English
Contrary
to what many Americans imagine, bilingualism or multilingualism is the
rule rather than the exception in much of the world. Is there any connection
between bilingualism and cognitive development? How does bilingualism
develop and get maintained? Why is bilingual education controversial?
We will discuss the "Official English" movement as well: the
movement to make English the only permissible language to use in government-sponsored
functions.
V.
Signed languages and "deaf culture"
There
have always been signed (gestural) languages. There are many of them across
the world, and they differ from each other, just as spoken languages do.
They have not been typically recognized as "real" languages,
though. Why not? What have the consequences been?
VI.
Pidgins and Creoles
Pidgins
are a "simplified" form of language that emerge under specific
colonial situations. Creoles are languages that grow, spontaneously, out
of pidgins. A mysterious property of creoles is their similarity across
the world. Why should this be so, since they do not likely share a common
historical ancestor language? Do they tell us something about the human
genetic endowment for language? Why are pidgins and creoles often stigmatized
in relation to other languages, and what are the consequences of this?
VII.
Language death, language revival
It
appears that wholesale language extinction is taking place today at a
rate never before seen in human history. Why is this happening? Can it
be reversed? Why do few people know about it? Does it matter?
VIII.
Language and gender
There
are aspects of linguistic behavior that correlate roughly with sex. Why
is this? In fact, language seems to play a role in defining how men versus
women are perceived and how they are expected to behave.
Prerequisites:
none.
General Education Code: T5 (Topical: Humanities & Arts or Social
Sciences).
80G.
Nature and Language of Computers (Introduction to Unix)
MWF
12:30–1:40pm
Classroom Unit I
Instructor: Geoffrey Pullum
E-mail: pullum@ling.ucsc.edu
Introduction
to computing, the Internet, and the World Wide Web through the language
of the Unix operating system. Oriented to the beginner, the course presupposes
no previous acquaintance with any particular sort of computer. It covers
the basic concepts of text editing and formatting, writing web pages in
basic HTML, and promotes a rigorous understanding of Unix commands and
shell scripts. Views communication with a computer as a matter of learning
a few simple, though powerful, languages. (Also offered as Computer Science
80G. Students may not receive credit for both courses.)
Prerequisites:
none.
General Education Code: T2 (Topical-Natural Sciences).
88B. Grammar as Science: The Discovery of Linguistic Structure, 2 credits (Freshman Discovery Seminar)
Monday 5:15–7:00
p.m., Stevenson 221
Instructor: Geoffrey Pullum
E-mail: pullum@ling.ucsc.edu
Snailmail box: Stevenson College Faculty Services Office
Office phone: 459-4705 (office) or 459-2555 (messages)
Office location: Stevenson College, office 265
Office hours: By appointment; e-mail pullum@ling.ucsc.edu
or call 9-4705
Goals
The main goal of this course is to show that grammar is not a body of incorrigible dogma or permanently established law. Languages actually have grammatical principles that can be discovered through active research, and discovering what they really are is a lot more fun than reading in an old book what someone else once thought they were.
Modern linguistics has taught us that it is possible to use methods basically similar to those of the sciences—methods based on reasoning from evidence—to find out what the structures of sentences are, and thus to figure out the grammatical principles that provide sentences with the structural organization that makes them intelligible to us.
We will be concentrating on one of the only two languages in the world with more than a billion speakers: modern international standard English. In the case of this language, you might have thought there were no more real surprises in store; that is, you might think that everything about the grammar of English has been found out. This is certainly not so. What is more, many of the things that are stated in English grammar books are completely mistaken. And most people have no idea what is really in the grammar books, or how to tell the difference between the useful and accurate stuff and the misguided nonsense.
One of our first tasks will be to make sure we understand that a human language is not just a big bag of words. Consider the sentence in 1:
- Knowing lots of words is no use at all unless you also know how they can be put into the right combinations to make them express a particular meaning.
And now consider 2:
- A combinations be can express how into all is know also lots make meaning no of particular at knowing put right the them they to unless use words you.
Exactly the same words appear in 1 and 2, the same number of times. But how you arrange those words makes a lot of difference. What is the difference? That difference is what we mean when we refer to "the grammar of English."
Another early step will be to make sure we are clear what we mean when we talk about "standard" English, and what non-standard varieties there are, and what they are like.
The focus of this seminar will be very different from that of a normal grammar or writing class, because it will be based on discovery and research. Students will be expected to take an active interest in finding things out through observation and systematic gathering of data.
Prerequisites
There are no prerequisites for this course except for having a fairly good knowledge of the most widely spoken language on this planet. If your knowledge of English is good enough to get you admitted as a student at the prettiest campus of the world's greatest university, that's good enough.
It would be excellent (though it is certainly not essential) for every student to register for a Unix computer account with the CATS (Communications and Technology Services) office in the Communications Building. And, by the way, if anyone were thinking of taking this seminar concurrently with Linguistics 80G / Computer Science 80G, Introduction to Unix, that would be a great idea. This gives a slight danger of over-exposure to Geoff Pullum, who is the instructor for both courses, but, hey, that's not so bad. Go to <http://ling.ucsc.edu/~pullum> and check him out (click on the picture to get the parrot to come back and sit on his head). You can handle an extra few hours of this guy each week. And you would learn a few computer tricks that could be rather useful for your study of grammar.
Required Work and Evaluation
Students will be evaluated on the basis of class participation and contribution, which entail regular attendance and continuous and energetic engagement with the material in class discussion, together with brief presentations of results, and a (very short) final paper summing things up. No final exam.
Texts
Library resources and materials given out by the instructor will suffice for this course. A crucial background reference resource will be the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (in the McHenry Library and all good libraries, in the Reference section), and another will be this book:
Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
This book is too big to work all the way through sequentially and too expensive ($150) for students to purchase; a library copy will be on reserve.
An excellent short guide to grammar for college students is
James R. Hurford, Grammar: A Student's Guide (Cambridge University Press).
It is recommended for purchase by anyone interested in having a good grasp of grammatical terminology (the Bay Tree Bookstore may carry some copies, but I cannot guarantee it because there was no way to know the enrollment for this course in advance, so I could not state a firm guess at enrollment for the book order).
Ideally, I would like each student to visit some secondhand bookstore before the course begins and purchase any English grammar book they find on the English language shelves: any better-writing guide or grammar textbook or dictionary of usage—old ones are just fine. Strunk and White's famous little book The Elements of Style (over 80 years old!) is an example of what I mean, and it can generally be found in almost any secondhand bookstore. We will not be treating such books as authorities. We will be critiquing the content of many of them. It would be an advantage (it is not essential) if each student was acquainted with the content of at least one at the start of the course.
101.
Phonology I
MWF
11:00–12:10pm
Crown 208
Instructor: Dylan Herrick
E-mail: herrick@ling.ucsc.edu
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 Introduction to Linguistics (LING 20).
General Education Code: W (Writing Intensive).
102.
Phonology II
MWF
11:00–12:10pm
Cowell 134
Instructor: Adam Albright
E-mail: albright@ling.ucsc.edu
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).
113.
Syntax II
MWF
8:00–9:10am
Stevenson 152
Instructor: Jim McCloskey
E-mail: mcclosk@ling.ucsc.edu
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, and 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 homework assignments 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).
123.
Philosophy of Language (also
offered as Philosophy 123)
Instructor:
C. O'Callaghan
Course Description:
"Orange" is meaningful, "flurg" isn't; "Earth"' refers to something, "Santa Claus" doesn't; "Lava is hot" is true, "Bears are bald" isn't. But why? This course will be an advanced introduction to contemporary issues in the philosophy of language. We will discuss the work of Frege, Russell, Kripke, Lewis, Putnam, and others in the course of investigating the natures of reference, meaning, and truth. We will address questions such as what is it for a sign or a bit of language to be meaningful, or for it to represent or identify something? What is it for a statement to be truthful? What makes a bunch of words into a language? Can you believe Superman flies, but Clark Kent doesn't?
For more information, including preliminary syllabi for undergraduate and graduate versions, go to http://people.ucsc.edu/~cjo/teaching/language/language.html
187.
Structure of Japanese
TTH
10:00–11:45am
Stevenson 213
Instructor: Junko Ito
E-mail: ito@ling.ucsc.edu
This
course examines the linguistic structure of Japanese: phonology (sound
structure), morphology (word structure), and syntax (sentence structure).
The goal of the course is to discover the differences and similarities
of English and Japanese from a contemporary linguistics perspective and
to gain a deeper understanding of the structure of a natural language
through a detailed investigation of Japanese. The course will satisfy
the "Structure of" requirement for Language Studies students.
Course requirements: weekly homework assignments, midterm, and final.
Prerequisite:
As preparation for this course, students should have taken LING 20 or
some equivalent linguistics courses in syntax and phonology. Some knowledge
of Japanese is also required.