| CV | Research | Teaching | Home |
Kathryn Flack |
|
Current courseCS 236: Field methods in linguistics (fall 2008) What do you do when you're confronted with a completely new language? The goal of linguistics is to understand the fundamental structural properties of human languages; most linguists work towards this goal by studying languages that they themselves know well, or by working from published grammatical descriptions. But what do you do when no description exists, or when you need information that isn't in the description, or when you want to document a language that's never been documented before? In this course, we will develop a description of an unfamiliar language by eliciting data from a native speaker. We will cover many different aspects of the language, from the set of sounds to word formation principles to possible arrangements and rearrangements of words in sentences. Prerequisite: At least one course in linguistics or psychology of language. Previous coursesCS 237: Theory of language: Syntax and phonology (spring 2008) Within linguistics, phonology is the study of sound patterns inside words, and syntax considers how words can be assembled into sentences. This class will examine phonological and syntactic data from a wide variety of languages in order to investigate what sort of grammatical knowledge people have when they 'know a language'. Students will frequently construct analyses of unfamiliar linguistic data, and we will consider the implications of these analyses for universal grammar and grammatical theory. Students will be introduced to, and will evaluate, theoretical proposals about formal linguistic grammars. This course satisfies Division I distribution requirements. REA, WRI. CS 110: The nature of language (fall 2007) There are more than 6000 languages in the world, and in many ways they are extraordinarily diverse. Underneath their differences, though, languages resemble each other in fundamental ways. Identifying similarities among the world's languages leads to a range of other observations about language: spoken and signed languages have deep grammatical similarities, the ways in which similarities therefore reveal important truths about how languages are structured. But while languages can be extremely similar, there is a great deal of debate as to whether anything is universally true of all languages. This class will explore similarities among languages (and also the ways in which languages can vary), consider the source of these similarities, and wrestle with questions about true linguistic universals. Linguistics 201: Introduction to linguistic theory [Course website]
|