Linguistics 101: Fall 1996 Course Syllabus
Instructor:
Teaching Assistants:
Anthony Kroch
Alan Lee & Rashmi Prasad
614 Williams Hall
429 Williams Hall
898-3212
898-6050
Email addresses:
kroch@change.ling.upenn.edu
aleewk@babel.ling
rjprasad@babel.ling
Texts: 1. Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow.
2. Course Bulkpack.
This course will introduce you to linguistics, one of the core disciplines of the modern science of mind, from a mathematical point of view. Linguistics is a new science, less than a century old; but we have learned much in this brief period of scientific study about the
uniquely human capacity to code abstract thought in communicable form. In the course of this semester, we will explore some of the results obtained in the scientific investigation of language, especially what has been discovered regarding the formal structure of our
linguistic capacities and how our biologically endowed language faculty allows us to represent meanings as structured sequences of words. The course will show you that it is possible to study human language rigorously and scientifically and that such study leads to a
conception of language quite different from our everyday common-sense notions of the subject.
Requirements for the course consist of a midterm and a final exam, as well as a series of homework assignments, roughly one per week through the semester. The course is organized around an interesting recent book by Steven Pinker entitled "The Language
Instinct." This book is not a textbook but it covers in a readable way the basic aspects of the study of language. There will also be readings to supplement the Pinker book, which are available in the course bulkpack.
Topic 1: Introduction. How can there be a scientific study of language? How are language and thought related? What grammar is and how we learn it. What we can learn about language from the study of people who lose it or are kept by circumstances from
acquiring language in the normal way.
Reading: Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct. Chapters 1-3.
Perlmutter. "The Language of the Deaf."
Pullum. "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax."
Topic 2: Formal grammar - the mathematical structure of language. This section of the course introduces the idea that languages can be analyzed mathematically. We discuss the relationship between computer languages and natural human languages and the
notion of language complexity. We also introduce the concept of a phrase structure grammar, which underlies both computer and natural languages and the notion of a machine that automatically recognizes and parses sentences.
Reading: Michael Sipser. Introduction to the Theory of Computation. Chapters 0-2.
Topic 3: Syntax - the structure of sentences in natural language. This section will be a focus of the course. Here we will learn how sentences are built up out of words and why speakers are able to construct sentences of any degree of complexity with a fixed
vocabulary. We will also learn why linguists say that language is a rule-governed system and what some of the linguistic rules are that are used in the syntactic description of language. We will see how these rules determine both the structure of sentences and the
conditions under which strings of words are interpretable as sentences of a language instead of being meaningless word salad.
Reading: Pinker, chapter 4.
Topic 4: Semantics. What is 'meaning'? Lexical semantics. Truth conditional semantics. The distinction between sense and reference. Semantic compositionality. The relationship between syntax and semantics.
Reading: O'Grady, Dobrovolsky and Aronoff. Contemporary Linguistics: an Introduction. chapter 6.
Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet. Meaning and Grammar: An Introduction to Semantics. chapters 1-2.
Topic 5: Pragmatics. How do speakers take account of listeners' knowledge and beliefs in formulating utterances? What inferences beyond literal meaning listeners draw from what is said to them. What acts can be performed merely by speaking. How context
determines reference. The communicative effects of using particular syntactic constructions.
Reading: Finegan and Besnier. Language, Its Structure and Use. chaps. 7, 10.
Topic 6: Language in real time. How do listeners understand what speakers say? How do speakers convert thought into speech? How psycholinguists study what goes on inside our heads without looking inside them.
Reading: Pinker, chapters 7-8.
Akmajian et al. Linguistics: an Introduction to Language and Communication. chapter 10.
Final Exam Date: Monday, December 16, 1996, 8:30 AM