Detmar Meurers: Introduction to Language
Spring 2004, LING 201

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Syllabus

Handouts

• Handout 1. Basic Concepts of Language and Linguistics
• Handout 2. Communication systems
• Handout 3. Pragmatics I: The Relevance of Context and Speech Acts

• Handout 4. Pragmatics II: How to make sense of conversation (Grice)

• Handout 5. Semantics: Studying meaning

• Handout 6. Syntax I: Why Is It Needed and Part-of-Speech

• Handout 7. Syntax II: Ambiguity, or Why to Group Words into Phrases - And How

• Handout 8. Syntax III: Using Phrase Structure Grammars (in-class groupwork)

• Handout 9. Morphology I: How to find words in the dictionary, or Studying the structure of words

• Handout 10. Morhology II: Words with ambiguous structure and forming new words in different languages

• Handout 11. Phonetics I: Introduction, how sounds are formed, a phonetic alphabet

• Phonetics II: Prosody ("Prosody on the Web" website, local copy)

• Handout 12. Computational Linguistics: Introduction and Machine Translation

• Handout 13. Psycholinguistics (First Language Acquisition, Speech Errors)

• Handout 14. Historical Linguistics

• Handout 15. Sociolinguistics

Homeworks

• Homework 1 (Linguistics, Communication Systems)
• Homework 2 (Meaning Relationships, Thesaurus)
• Homework 3 (Syntax)
• Homework 4 (Mid-term evaluation)
• Homework 5 (Phonetics)
• Homework 6 (Computational Linguistics: MT)
• Homework 7 (Psycholinguistics: Language Acquisition, Speech Errors)
• Homework 8 (Historical Linguistics and Variation)

Handouts and homeworks appear on this page as the course progresses. All links point to pdf files, which can, e.g., be read and printed with the free Acrobat Reader.

Related links

• Animal communication:
  • Web page of Koko the Gorilla (Gorilla Foundation)
  • A chat with Koko the Gorilla (abc NEWS)

• Semantics:
  • A Visual Thesaurus
  • Online form to use the English Wordnet, an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory (Project description)

  Phonetics:

  • X-Rays of vocal tract during speaking
  • Sammy - A system allowing you to interactively change articulation and see the corresponding phonetic symbol.
  • English Vowels - symbols and sounds
  • Sounds of the World - Hear the sounds of various languages. For example, the clicks in Nama, !Xoo, Zulu, (click the word transcription to hear the sound)
  • Resources For Studying Spoken English - Many interesting links
  • Another site with lots of links on the topic
  • English with 300 different accents - hear people reading the same paragraph, see the phonetic transcription and typical properties of the accent (click the (i) icon for that)
  • Graphs - waveforms, spectrograms for some English sentences, words and vowels (advanced)
  • http://alt-usage-english.org/ipa/ascii_ipa_american_only.shtml - You can play examples for the different symbols of the international phonetic alphabet (scroll down to section "The symbols")
  • http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/faciliti/demos/vocalfolds/vocalfolds.htm - Page showing vibrating vocal folds
  • Some films of the larynx

• Speech errors:
  • The Tale of Rindercella (page includes link to mp3) from the site "Goonerisms Spalore! Meducating the Asses since 1997!"
  • Archie Campbell's "The Pee Little Thrigs"
  • Lirty Dies, politically charged spoonerisms performed by the Capitol Steps.

• Historical Linguistics: Two recordings of Cadmon's Hymn in Old English