Course Notes

These are slightly edited versions of the notes used in class lectures. Mostly they consist of material from overheads used in class. They are made available to you as an additional resource to help you learn, but they are most definitely not to be taken as a substitute for attendance in class lectures. You may find that some critical points that were discussed in class are not obvious from looking at the notes. Also, there may be things that are simply missing from these notes.

1. Introduction: why study language scientifically? (still under construction)
2. Languages of the World
3. Morphology I: what's in the mental dictionary?
4. Morphology II: productivity and predictability (the ruly, the unruly, and the rulyish)
5. Syntax I: what syntax is about; starting to build a grammar
6. Syntax II: expanding the grammar, recursion, using "Trees"
7. Syntax III: more on recursion and ambiguity; word-order differences
8. Syntax IV: more word-order differences; transformations
9. Semantics I: what meanings consist of
10. Semantics II: language and thought
11. Semantics III: talking about space
12. Phonetics I: mechanisms of speech production
13. Phonetics II: consonants
14. Phonetics III: vowels, systematic alternations, perception
15. Phonology I: what phonology is about; phonemes and allophones
16. Phonology II: how to identify phonemes and allophones
17. Phonology III: phonological alternations, phonological rules
18. Phonology IV: types of phonological processes, dialect differences
19. Sociolinguistics I: varieties of English
20. Sociolinguistics II: language diversity, especially African American Vernacular English
21. Language Acquisition I: contributions of human nature and environment; comparison with birdsong
22. Language Acquisition II: how children impose their own structure on language input
23. Language and Brain I: lateralization (or not) of language, aphasic syndromes
24. Language and Brain II:

This page last updated 12/6/97, 2:45pm