Introduction to Linguistics

Linguistics 101
Fall 2006

Course Goals

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. This course serves as an introduction to its concerns, methods, and various subfields. We will examine what it means to know a language---that is, what knowledge or cognitive system a person must have in order to speak a language, and the nature of that knowledge or cognitive system; how this system might be represented in the brain; how different languages vary and how they are the same; how languages change over time; and how language is used in social contexts.

The course will emphasize both the diversity of language and its universal aspects. Even a single language, English, varies from region to region, from past to present, and even from one social situation to another. Similarly, thousands of different languages are spoken across the globe, all of which differ remarkably. Equally remarkable, however, is how much they have in common. Exploring this diversity and similarity will be a large part of the course. We will also look at the relation between language and culture, the question of whether language determines thought, and whether animals have anything like human language.

Everyone speaks a language, but how they do so is largely subconscious. By the end of this course, you will have gained some conscious understanding of the enormous complexity of your language ability (how sounds and morphemes are combined to make words, how words are combined to make sentences, etc.) and how linguists investigate it; but perhaps more importantly, you will be able to see through prejudices and misunderstandings about language and evaluate critically how it is used and misused in the cultural, social, political, and even scientific spheres.

Textbook

• Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Language and Linguistics, 9^th edition, edited by Georgios Tserdanelis and Wai Yi Peggy Wong, published by the Ohio State University Press, Columbus.

Lectures

Course Requirements

In order to participate in this course, you are expected to:

• Attend the lectures and discussion sections.
• Do the readings and formulate questions about them that you can ask during class time.
• Complete regular homework assignments.
• Pass several quizzes and a cumulative final exam.

1. Attendance and participation 10%
2. Homework assignments (8) 30%
3. Quizzes (3) 30%
4. Final exam 30%

Attendance and Participation

Attendance is checked in every discussion session, and if you must miss a class, you are obliged to let the instructor or your discussion leader know prior to your absence (the most convenient way to do so is to email us). If you cannot notify us beforehand for some reason, you need to provide supporting evidence (e.g., a letter from your physician or dorm adviser) to get full credit. Attendance will not be checked in the lecture, but material will be presented there that does not appear in the textbook, and you will be tested on this material.

Each discussion session has a maximum of 25 students and will be further divided into small work groups (4-5 students each). Part of the discussion sections will be devoted to group work on the homework assignments. Homework assignments will be written up outside of class and handed in individually, but you are expected to play an active role in working on the homework as a group during the discussion sessions. Your participation is evaluated by the TAs and counts towards the final grade.

Homework and Exams

In most section meetings you will be given a homework assignment. You will always have some time during class to work on these as a group. Each student will write them up and hand them in individually at the next class. These assignments will count toward 30% of your grade. While it will be possible to do the assignments individually, working on them as a group usually helps everyone involved. It is important that you come to the sections and participate with your group.

Late homework will not be accepted unless some arrangement is made prior to its due date. Under certain circumstances you may succeed in convincing us to accept late homework, but it is almost certain that you will not get full credit in such a case.

In addition to the homework assignments, there will be three quizzes distributed throughout the semester. These will count toward 30% of your final grade. The quizzes will be given in section on Thursday.

If you are sick or have an emergency and have to miss class, contact your TA or the professor as soon as possible, ideally BEFORE the class you are going to miss. YOU are responsible for finding out what an assignment was and handing it in on the normal due date (if you are sick for several days, we require verification from the Dean's office). If you miss a quiz in section, you must make it up before the next lecture.

The final exam will count for 30% of the final grade. It will be cumulative, testing material covered throughout the semester.

Tutoring

If you have questions about the course or feel that you need extra help, your first port of call should be the instructor or the TA. Still, sometimes people would rather go to somebody else for help. For this reason, the Department of Linguistics has arranged to make free tutoring for LING 101 students available at the Academic Enrichment Center (at 148-150 South College Ave).

At least one graduate student from the Department of Linguistics will be available at the Academic Services Center on most days of the week. The schedule can be found on the Linguistics Department's website at:

Tutoring Schedule

The tutors are there to help you. They will be able to help you best if you:

1. Ask for help early---don't expect a miracle cure to be found the day before the exam!
2. Come to the tutor armed with specific questions. Don't expect to gain much from very general pleas (e.g., "I don't understand ANYthing, the instructor makes no sense, and the exam is the day after tomorrow---HELP!").
3. Bring a copy of relevant materials: textbook, homework assignment, class notes, etc. The tutors will be working with students from a number of different sections of LING 101, so they will want to know about the specific material being covered in your section.

What the tutors can not and will not do:

1. Your homework for you. They will be glad to help you, but do not even try to get them to do it for you.
2. Repeat a lecture that you missed or slept through. The tutors can answer questions about the lecture, but they are not there to repeat it.

The tutors should be a valuable resource for you, and we encourage you to use it. If you have any further questions about the tutoring service, please talk to the instructor or to your TA. Also, if you have comments on the LING 101 tutoring service, please pass these on to the instructor.

Schedule (check often: subject to change!)

Readings should be done before the lecture they are listed with.

Assignments

• HW #1 Language (9/7, due 9/12)
  1. Handout
• HW #2 Morphology (9/21, due 9/26)
  1. Exercise 5, p.154 (File 5.2)
  2. Exercise 1, p.154 (File 5.3), last column only (s-aa)
  3. Exercise 2.1, p.176 (File 5.6), on Swahili
• HW #3 Syntax (9/28, due 10/3)
  1. Exercise 1, p.194: Give a sentence for each verb, and say what thematic role its subject has.
  2. Exercise 5, p.204
  3. Exercise 3, p.208
  4. Exercise 1, pp.210-211: Give all the PS rules for Hindi (but ignore sentence (iv)); draw a tree for sentence (ii)
• HW #3 Make-up (10/5, due 10/10; you can do this or have what you previously handed in count)
  1. Exercise 2, p.149: write a sentence for each verb and say what the thematic role of the subject and object (if there is an object) is
  2. Exercise 2, p.204: draw trees for a, d, e, g, j
  3. Exercise 4, p.208
  4. Exercise 1, p.211: give the phrase structure rules for Japanese (but ignore sentence iv); draw a tree for sentence iii
• HW #4 Semantics (10/5, due 10/10)
  1. Exercise 5, p.249: For each situation, say whether the warning is felicitous or not; if not, say which of the felicity conditions (1, 2, or 3) is violated.
  2. Exercise 1, p.251
  3. Exercise 6, p.256
• HW #5 Phonetics (10/12, due 10/17)
  1. Exercise 2, p.63
  2. Exercise 3, p.63
  3. Exercise 6, p.64, last two columns only (ee-hhh)
  4. Exercise 8, p.65
• HW #6 Typology (10/26, due 10/31)
  1. Handout
• HW #7 Historical Linguistics (11/2, due 11/7)
  1. Exercise 5, p.424
  2. Exercise 7, p.425
  3. Exercise 2, p.439 (note that you have access to the OED online through the library's website)
• HW #8 Creoles (11/16, due 11/21)
  1. Handout: Assignment
  2. Handout: Krio story

Extra Credit

• Find a language not discussed in class (not allowed: Japanese, German, Spanish, Italian, English, Mandarin Chinese, Hawaiian Creole, Krio).
• Syntactic description: Word order
  1. Free vs. fixed?
  2. Order of S, V, O
  3. Prepositions or postpositions?
  4. PPs before or after the verb?
  5. Possessors and relative clauses before or after N?
• Morphological type (isolating, fusional, agglutinating, polysynthetic)
• Illustrate all of these with examples (using standard transliteration of that language or IPA).

• wh-movement vs. wh-in-situ;
• how yes-no questions are formed;
• phonemes of the language (consonants and vowels);
• whether the language is a tone language or not;
• anything else we have covered in class.

• Afrikaans (Morris Library PF861.D58 1993)
• Akkadian (Morris Library PJ 3251 .H84 1997)
• Mohawk (Morris Library PM1882 .B6 1973)
• Athpare (Morris Library PL3801.A84 E34 1997)
• Basque (Morris Library PH5031 .G73 2003)
• Berbice Dutch Creole (Morris Library PM7864 .G95 K68 1994)
• Chalcatongo Mixtec (Morris Library P25 .A1 C34 v. 127)
• ...and so on; the library has tons of grammars (try browsing on titles beginning with ``grammar of'').

• If the language you are working on uses special symbols (IPA symbols or something else) and your computer doesn't have them, you can use symbols your computer has, like @, #, $ and so on, and then explain what each symbol means, for example, @=schwa.
• Please give a list of abbreviations that you use.
• If you use grammars or dictionaries, give those references at the end of the paper.
• If you use a person as your primary reference, state who that person is (roommate, e.g.).
• DUE DATE: 11/30/2006 (due in section on Thurs).

On-Line Resources

The Language Files

• http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/publications/files/

Phonetics Links with Videos and Sound

• Hear all the IPA consonants and vowels
• Videos of normal and cancerous larynxes
• X-ray speech videos
• Interactive sagittal section of the vocal tract

General

• The Shm-Reduplication Survey
• The Linguistic Society of America (especially Fields of Linguistics)
• The Linguist List

This Website:

http://www.ling.udel.edu/bruening/Courses/101Syllabus2006.html