Courses

Students with no previous background in American Sign Language (ASL) will be introduced to basic conversational techniques in ASL, including both expressive and receptive skills.  Basic grammar and vocabulary will be covered, including explanations of the fundamental parts of a sign, proper use of fingerspelling, and the significance of non-manual features. Instruction will be supplemented with videos, allowing students to begin exploring the visual literature of the Deaf community in the United States. Readings and class discussions will acquaint students with American Deaf culture, history and education, and the historical development of ASL.

Full details for ASL 1101 - American Sign Language I

This intermediate level course will focus on rigorous development and expansion of ASL vocabulary, non-manual signals, and grammar features through communicative activities. Students will develop ASL presentations to increase communicative fluency. The course provides continued development and discussion related to intercultural competence, ASL literature, ASL linguistics and American Deaf culture/community.

Full details for ASL 2201 - Intermediate American Sign Language I

This course provides an overview of various genres in American Sign Language literature including narratives, folklore, ABC stories, poetry, translated works and visual vernacular. Students will analyze contents, themes and stylistic techniques of works done by various ASL literary artists. This course emphasizes critiquing various narrative and poetic genres with planning and development of new literary works.

Full details for ASL 2302 - ASL Literature

In this course the students learn the skill of writing at the university level. Instructors offer themes for their courses within their own special areas of expertise.  

Full details for LING 1100 - FWS: Language, Thought, and Reality

Overview of the science of language, especially its theoretical underpinnings, methods, and major findings. Areas covered include: the relation between sound and meaning in human languages, social variation in language, language change over time, universals of language, and the mental representation of linguistic knowledge. Students are introduced to a wide variety of language phenomena, drawn not only from languages resembling English, but also from many that appear to be quite unlike English, such as those native to the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the South Pacific.

Full details for LING 1101 - Introduction to Linguistics

An introduction to the essentials of Sanskrit grammar. Designed to enable the student to read classical and epic Sanskrit as soon as possible.

Full details for LING 1131 - Elementary Sanskrit I

In this writing intensive course, we will explore how language and society affect each other. How do class, age, ethnicity, gender, and geography affect the way people speak? Why are some ways of speaking considered prestigious and others stigmatized? How does increased use of online communication and social media affect how we communicate? How are power relations captured in language? How does national policy-e.g., "English-only" policies-affect both politics and language use? What are the linguistic issues behind the Ebonics debate? In this course, through extensive discussion and various types of writing, we consider these questions both in the context of the United States and other parts of the world.

Full details for LING 2221 - Language and Society

Yiddish language and linguistics, including aspects of its morphology, syntax, and phonology. Also the history of the Yiddish language and sociolinguistic topics.

Full details for LING 2241 - Yiddish Linguistics

Readings from simple Sanskrit poetry: the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

Full details for LING 2251 - Intermediate Sanskrit I

An introduction to the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Proto-Indo-European and the chief historical developments of the daughter languages.

Full details for LING 2261 - Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics

This course explores both syntax (how words and phrases are combined into sentences) and semantics (how the meanings of words, phrases, and sentences are interpreted). The course aims to give students to the ability to address questions regarding syntactic and semantic properties of languages in a rigorous and informed fashion. Topics covered include phrase structure, grammatical relations, transformations, semantic composition, modification, quantification, and the syntax/semantics interface. Emphasis throughout the course is placed on forming and testing hypotheses.

Full details for LING 3303 - Introduction to Syntax and Semantics

Old Norse is a collective term for the earliest North Germanic literary languages: Old Icelandic, Old Norwegian, Old Danish, and Old Swedish. The richly documented Old Icelandic is the center of attention, and the purpose is twofold: the students gain knowledge of an ancient North Germanic language, important from a linguistic point of view, and gain access to the medieval Icelandic (and Scandinavian) literature. The structure of Old Norse (Old Icelandic), phonology, and morphology, with reading of selections from the Prose-Edda, a 13th-century narrative based on the Eddaic poetry. 

Full details for LING 3315 - Old Norse I

The Romance languages are the lasting imprint of all that happened to the Latin language as it moved through time, territories, and people of many ethnicities.  While the Latin of antiquity retained its prestige in high culture, the natural untutored usage of ordinary people was always free to go its own way.  This course covers the following topics, selected to create a panoramic view:  Formation of the general Romance seven-vowel system from Latin.  Early and widespread sound changes in popular Latin.  Finding and interpreting evidence for trends in popular Latin pronunciation.  The comparative method and its limitations.  Essential later sound changes, some of which ceate a whole new order of consonants unknown to Latin but conspicuous in Romance.  Nouns and adjectives from Latin to Romance.  Formation of the present indicative: the competing forces of sound change and analogical adjustment.  A brief overview of Portuguese.  Variants of the seven-vowel system.  Salient features of Romanian.  Factors that helped shape the vocabulary of Romance.  Medieval diglossia.  Emergence of Romance vernaculars newly recognized by their speakers as languages distinct from Latin and from each other.  Close analysis of the oldest surviving document written unmistakably in Romance (842 C. E.).

Full details for LING 3321 - History of Romance Languages I

An introduction to the language and culture of the Cayuga (Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ) people. Basic language instruction provided in an immersive learning environment, focusing on the relationship of language and culture to plants and growing.

Full details for LING 3324 - Cayuga Language and Culture

An introduction to some of the main issues in the philosophy of language. Topics may include names, definite descriptions, belief ascriptions, truth-conditional theories of meaning, pragmatics, and metaphor. Both historical and contemporary readings are considered.

Full details for LING 3332 - Philosophy of Language

Independent study of linguistics topics not covered in regular curriculum for undergrads.

Full details for LING 3390 - Independent Study in Linguistics

Provides an introduction to phonological theory. The empirical basis, theoretical approaches, and relevant literature are explored through extensive data analysis and critical reading.

Full details for LING 4401 - Phonology I

An advanced introduction to syntactic theory within the principles and parameters/minimalist frameworks. Topics include phrase structure, argument structure (unaccusative verbs, unergative verbs, double object constructions), principles of word order, and the binding theory.

Full details for LING 4403 - Syntax I

This course provides advanced instruction in phonetic analysis and experimental methodology. Students learn about various theories of speech perception, production, and cognitive representation. This provides a background in which students develop an original research project. The goals of this course are for students to gain a conceptual understanding of phonetic analyses and to acquire practical experience in using phonetic analyses to explore cognitive dimensions of speech.

Full details for LING 4419 - Phonetics I

Introduces methods for theorizing about meaning within generative grammar. These techniques allow the creation of grammars that pair syntactic structures with meanings. Students look at several empirical areas in detail, among them complementation (combining heads with their arguments), modification, conjunction, definite descriptions, relative clauses, traces, bound pronouns, and quantification. An introduction to logical and mathematical concepts used in linguistic semantics (e.g., set theory, functions and their types, and the lambda notation for naming linguistic meanings) is included in the course.

Full details for LING 4421 - Semantics I

Addresses the basic issues in the study of words and their structures. Provides an introduction to different types of morphological structures with examples from a wide range of languages.

Full details for LING 4423 - Morphology

An in-depth exploration of modern computational linguistic techniques. A continuation of  LING 4424 - Computational Linguistics I. Whereas LING 4424 covers foundational techniques in symbolic computational modeling, this course will cover a wider range of applications as well as coverage of neural network methods. We will survey a range of neural network techniques that are widely used in computational linguistics and natural language processing as well as a number of techniques that can be used to probe the linguistic information and language processing strategies encoded in computational models. We will examine ways of mapping this linguistic information both to linguistic theory as well as to measures of human processing (e.g., neuroimaging data and human behavioral responses).

Full details for LING 4434 - Computational Linguistics II

The language of the Homeric epics: dialect background, archaisms, modernizations. The special language of epic as a synchronic system: its constitution, use, and internal consistency. Phonological and morphological aspects of Homeric diction and compositional technique.

Full details for LING 4457 - Homeric Language

This course constitutes an introduction to natural language processing (NLP), the goal of which is to enable computers to use human languages as input, output, or both. NLP is at the heart of many of today's most exciting technological achievements, including machine translation, automatic conversational assistants and Internet search. Possible topics include methods for handling underlying linguistic phenomena (e.g., syntactic analysis, word sense disambiguation and discourse analysis) and vital emerging applications (e.g., machine translation, sentiment analysis, summarization and information extraction). 

Full details for LING 4474 - Natural Language Processing

This course provides structure and guidance to students doing an honors thesis in linguistics. The course consists of biweekly meeting of all honors thesis writers with the course instructor. Students will prepare presentations and written materials including topic, background, outline, methodology for honors project for class presentation and discussion. The course also covers aspects of linguistics research methodology.

Full details for LING 4491 - Honors Research Workshop I

Directed honors thesis research for students working on an honors thesis, taken with the student's honors thesis chair or other committee member.

Full details for LING 4493 - Honors Thesis Research

An introduction to the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Proto-Indo-European and the chief historical developments of the daughter languages.

Full details for LING 6261 - Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics

An introduction to the language and culture of the Cayuga (Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ) people. Basic language instruction provided in an immersive learning environment, focusing on the relationship of language and culture to plants and growing.

Full details for LING 6324 - Cayuga Language and Culture

Provides an introduction to phonological theory. The empirical basis, theoretical approaches, and relevant literature are explored through extensive data analysis and critical reading.

Full details for LING 6401 - Phonology I

An advanced introduction to syntactic theory within the principles and parameters/minimalist frameworks. Topics include phrase structure, argument structure (unaccusative verbs, unergative verbs, double object constructions), principles of word order, and the binding theory.

Full details for LING 6403 - Syntax I

This course provides advanced instruction in phonetic analysis and experimental methodology. Students learn about various theories of speech perception, production, and cognitive representation. This provides a background in which students develop an original research project. The goals of this course are for students to gain a conceptual understanding of phonetic analyses and to acquire practical experience in using phonetic analyses to explore cognitive dimensions of speech.

Full details for LING 6419 - Phonetics I

Introduces methods for theorizing about meaning within generative grammar. These techniques allow the creation of grammars that pair syntactic structures with meanings. Students look at several empirical areas in detail, among them complementation (combining heads with their arguments), modification, conjunction, definite descriptions, relative clauses, traces, bound pronouns, and quantification. An introduction to logical and mathematical concepts used in linguistic semantics (e.g., set theory, functions and their types, and the lambda notation for naming linguistic meanings) is included in the course.

Full details for LING 6421 - Semantics I

Addresses the basic issues in the study of words and their structures. Provides an introduction to different types of morphological structures with examples from a wide range of languages.

Full details for LING 6423 - Morphology

The language of the Homeric epics: dialect background, archaisms, modernizations. The special language of epic as a synchronic system: its constitution, use, and internal consistency. Phonological and morphological aspects of Homeric diction and compositional technique.

Full details for LING 6457 - Homeric Language

Examination of recent developments in the core areas of phonetics and phonology as well as its interfaces with other components of the grammar (e.g., morphosyntax, semantics or pragmatics). Topics covered include current approaches and relevant theoretical and historical perspectives.

Full details for LING 6601 - Topics in Phonetics-Phonological Theory

An assortment of subjects intended for students with previous training in Indo-European linguistics: problems in the reconstruction of Proto Indo-European, topics in the historical grammars of the various IE languages, reading and historical linguistic analysis of texts, and grammatical sketches of "minor" IE languages.

Full details for LING 6635 - Indo-European Workshop

The phonetics data analysis workshop provides students with practice in analysis and visualization of phonetic data, using Matlab, R, and Praat. Experiment design and statistical methods are emphasized.

Full details for LING 6692 - Phonetic Data Analysis Workshop

This seminar provides a venue for feedback on research projects, invited speakers, and paper discussions within the area of computational psycholinguistics.

Full details for LING 6693 - Computational Psycholinguistics Discussion

An independent study for graduate students.

Full details for LING 7701 - Directed Research

Addresses current theoretical and empirical issues in semantics.

Full details for LING 7711 - Semantics Seminar

Seminar discussing linguistic theory, field methodology and language documentation.

Full details for LING 7719 - Interface Seminar