Linguistics Faculty Courses
The Linguistics minor is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on courses from many departments. The Linguistics faculty regularly offer the following courses.
Taylor Arnold
Math and Computer Science
MATH 289: Data Science
Data science is an interdisciplinary field concerned with extracting knowledge from data and communicating those results to some public audience. This course will be taught using a problem-based learning model. As a class, we will be addressing an open ended research question and learning various skills that will assist our inquiry. Our object of study for this semester (Fall 2018) concerns the edit history of pages on Wikipedia; research will be guided by drawing on questions such as: How is knowledge being represented through the works of an anonymous, decentralized collective of users connected across the internet? What kinds of knowledge are privileged, or taken for granted, by citation patterns on the internet? How do cultural and linguistic factors play into the structure of Wikipedia pages across different languages? We will see how the methods of data science provide a new set of tools that are able to engage with, rather than against, other disciplinary techniques in the humanities and social sciences while opening the possibility of producing knowledge through the study of large unstructured data sets.
MATH 389: Statistical Learning
Description coming soon.
Thomas Bonfiglio
Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
LLC 203: Introductory Linguistics
General introduction to the study of language as a medium of cognition and perception and as a social institution. The course focuses on phonetics; word formation; historical linguistics; syntax; semantics; cultural assumptions coded in texts; variation based on region, gender, class, and race/ethnicity; how language determines cultural and social categories; and the relationship between language and thought.
- Prerequisites: Completion of Communication Skills II-Language requirement
- Fulfills FSSA requirement
This course studies the origin, development, and use of language as an implement of racial and ethnic discrimination. The central concept of the course is ethnolinguistic nationalism, the phenomenon that configures nativism and national language together as an apparatus that privileges a central, original population and marginalizes others. Central to this study is the illumination of the discourses of native language, native speaker, proper language, and proper pronunciation as displacements of fundamentally race conscious and ethnocentric ideologies. In other words, notions of ethnic purity and propriety become transferred onto language, which then acts as a surrogate theater for the performance of exclusionary nationalism. This course historicizes the problem and describes its origins in the nascent nationalisms of the emergent European nation states of early modernity. It demonstrates the absence of ethnolinguistic nationalism before the development of the modern nation state. It then demonstrates the beginnings of ethnolinguistic nationalism in Italy and its subsequent diffusion throughout Europe, especially in France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Germany. Comparisons are also made between the forms of ethnolinguistic nationalism in the states that originated from the dissolution of the eastern and western regions of the Holy Roman Empire. The course also studies the rise of standard American English in the United States as a function of race and ethnicity and concentrate on anti-Semitism and the ?English only? movements to marginalize Spanish and AAVE (African American Vernacular English). It also examines the research on the misprisions involved in the biologizing of language and the folkloric location of language in the body.
Hear more about Professor Bonfiglio’s perspective on the notion of the “native speaker” by listening to this lecture he gave at the University of Arizona.
David Giancaspro
Latin American, Latino, and Iberian Studies
LAIS 397: Spanish in the US
Dieter Gunkel
Classical Studies
LING 250: Introduction to Syntax
This course introduces students to the study of syntax, i.e. how words are combined to form phrases, clauses, and sentences. Students learn to identify syntactic units, to analyze complex syntactic structures, and to create model grammars that generate those structures. Successfully completing LING 250 satisfies the Symbolic Reasoning Field of Study requirement.
- The course does not presuppose any background in mathematics or foreign languages.
- Fulfills FSSR requirement
LING 252: Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics
This course familiarizes students with the Indo-European language family, its history, its textual artefacts, and the cultures that produced them. It also introduces students to the methods used by working Indo-Europeanists. Readings, lectures, and discussions cover the grammar reconstructed for proto-Indo-European (PIE) as well as its vocabulary, which facilitates reconstruction of PIE culture (e.g. law, family structure, mythology, and various other aspects of the way of life of PIE speakers).
- Fulfills FSHT requirement
Elizabeth Kissling
Latin American, Latino, and Iberian Studies
LAIS 411: Bilingualism in US, Latin America, and Spain
Taught in Spanish. The main goals of the course are students to understand bilingualism as a complex social phenomenon that takes on different forms in different political and educational contexts throughout the Spanish-speaking world as well as a set of multiple capacities possessed by bilingual individuals, to apply the concepts they have learned in class to their own original research, and to improve their communicative competency in Spanish. As such, the course discusses bilingualism at both a societal and individual level. At the societal level, course topics include language maintenance, language loss/shift, language policies, and bilingual education. These phenomena are analyzed in the contexts of various specific communities within the US, Latin America and Spain. At the level of the bilingual individual, course topics include the mental lexicon, language processing, code switching, simultaneous versus sequential bilingualism, and heritage language acquisition. The course actively engages students in research.
LAIS 412: The Sounds of Spanish
Taught in Spanish. Accent is perceived as an indicator not only of geographical origin but also age, gender, sexual orientation, race, educational attainment, and social class. Accents are used as tools to create in-groups, out-groups, form identities, and secure power. Thus accent is socially very meaningful. This course is an introduction to the topic of accent with special attention given to Spanish as a world language.
In this course we will begin studying accent as a phonetician would. We will analyze the sound inventory of “standard Latin American Spanish,” engaging in auditory and acoustic analysis of particular sounds. We will discuss how sounds are represented in the minds of speakers and discover that the representation of one’s first language can influence her pronunciation of a second language. We will contrast the phonologies of English and Spanish in an attempt to approximate “standard” Spanish pronunciation.
We will then explore the vast dialectal variation that exists in the Spanish-speaking world, both across North and South America, the Caribbean, and Spain. We will discuss patterns of features shared by speakers from different regions and attune our ears to better understand a variety of accents in Spanish. In the process we will discover how particular features and varieties of Spanish are stigmatized while others are accorded prestige, learning to differentiate between overt prestige and covert prestige.
Students will engage in acoustic analysis of their own speech and that of others, do research and make presentations about dialect regions, contribute to daily discussions about the role of accent, and engage in an original research project that synthesizes all they have learned in the course.
LALIS 397: Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics
Taught in Spanish. In this course, students are introduced to four main areas of linguistics analysis as applied to the Spanish language: physical sounds (phonetics) and their properties as mental categories (phonology); word formation (morphology); sentence structure (syntax); and discourse and variation (historical linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics). The goals guiding the course are that students acquire a basic understanding of the fundamental topics in Hispanic linguistics; apply this knowledge to their learning of Spanish as a second language; analyze linguistic problems by reasoning them out and proposing logical solutions; contribute to discussions about the relationships between language, culture, and cognition; and improve their communicative competency in Spanish in all skill areas.
FYS 100 The Power and Prejudice of Language
Why do certain accents sound good or bad? Who decides what is “proper” English? Why do we change our speech style? In this course students learn that our views about accent are linguistically arbitrary. Students will expose language prejudices in the world around them, starting with television and film. Next, they will explore the construction of “standard” language and debunk popular notions about “African American English” and “Spanglish.” They will learn about educational practices that either support or disenfranchise speakers of nonstandard varieties. Finally, students will learn about how linguistic style constructs identity and shapes social interaction. They will analyze their own speech and discover their prejudices about language.
Matthew Lowder
Psychology
PSYC 343: Psycholinguistics with lab
It’s easy to take language for granted because it is so central to who we are as humans. Language feels like it comes easily to us, and so we don’t usually think about what an incredibly complex process it is. But why does it seem so effortless? What’s actually going on “behind the scenes”? What are the cognitive processes that allow us to read text, comprehend speech, or utter a sentence that no one in the history of the universe has ever uttered? The field of psycholinguistics is focused on answering questions like these empirically—that is, by posing precise research questions that can be addressed using rigorous experimental methods. The goal of this course is to introduce students to the study of psycholinguistics, focusing on some of the major research topics, methodological approaches, and theoretical debates in the field. Some of the questions we'll discuss in the course include: What can speech errors reveal about the normal language production process? When we hear an ambiguous word (e.g., "bank"), how quickly do we zero in on the intended meaning? How do we know when language is meant to be interpreted literally vs. figuratively? How do speakers and listeners cooperate with one another during conversation? How do children acquire language so quickly? How do bilinguals control their two languages, and do the two languages compete with one another?
PSYC 333: Cognitive Science with Lab
The goal of cognitive science—and of this course—is to understand how the mind works. To most people, this topic is intuitively appealing, but it also turns out to be an incredibly ambitious undertaking. To appreciate how difficult this question is to answer, consider that in virtually every other scientific discipline, we use our minds to study something else. In cognitive science, the mind is studying itself. Because studying the mind is such a challenging endeavor, cognitive science tackles the problem by integrating approaches from a wide variety of disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. This course will introduce you to the major approaches from these fields and show you how they complement one another to help us address fundamental questions about how the mind works. Drawing from these various perspectives, we will explore the nature of mental processes such as perception, attention, memory, visual imagery, language, decision-making, problem solving, and intelligence. We will focus heavily on the idea of the mind as an information processor, addressing questions about what types of information the mind processes, how this is achieved in humans, and how the information-processing abilities of the human mind might be implemented in artificial systems.
PSYC 449: (Mis)understanding Language
A great deal of early research in psycholinguistics was focused on questions about how we build syntactic structures of sentences in our minds. Although a variety of different theories emerged, they all had one thing in common: they assumed that language processing was careful and methodical and that people eventually arrived at the correct interpretation. At the same time, other researchers in cognitive psychology were starting to demonstrate instances in which people routinely misunderstand the meaning of sentences. For example, when asked the question “How many of each type of animal did Moses take on the ark?”, most people incorrectly respond “two” rather than pointing out that it was Noah (and not Moses) who is said to have taken animals on the ark in the Biblical story. This example and many other “semantic illusions” demonstrated that people often derive an understanding of language that is incomplete, shallow, or in some cases completely inaccurate. Under what circumstances do we fully understand a sentence, versus understand it only at a level that feels “good enough”? What does this tell us about the nature of the human mind? The goal of this seminar is to read and discuss the scientific literature on these topics.