11 courses with the subject LING GU, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
This course provides an introduction to semantics, the study of meaning in language. We will explore a range of semantic phenomena, and students will learn the tools and techniques of formal semantic analysis as well as core concepts, goals, and findings of the field
Prerequisites: LING UN3101 LING W3101. Prerequisites: LING UN3101 Language, like all components of culture, is structured and conventional, yet can nevertheless change over time. This course examines how language changes, firstly as a self-contained system that changes organically and autonomously, and secondly as contextualized habits that change in time, in space, and in communities. Workload: readings ＆ discussion, weekly problems, and final examination
Prerequisites: LING UN3101 LING W3101. Prerequisites: LING 3101: Introduction to Linguistics and LING 4376: Phonetics ＆ Phonology This course provides training in linguistic fieldwork for language documentation and description. We will work with a speaker of an understudied language to investigate the structure of the language (its sounds, word and sentence formation, ways of expressing meaning, and usage) and learn about its speakers and their communities, both in NYC and abroad. Through this process, students will learn collaborative linguistic fieldwork techniques as well as the art of writing linguistic descriptions. This course will draw on all aspects of students’ linguistic training to date, and the success of the course will depend on our ability as a class to work together cooperatively with the language consultant and language community more broadly to document and describe the language
The African continent is home not to simply a collection of similar "African dialects," but to at least 1000 distinct languages that belong to five language families, none of them any more closely related than English and its relatives are to Japanese. This includes the Semitic languages that emerged in the Middle East and are now most commonly associated with Arabic and Hebrew, the famous "click" languages of Southern Africa whose origins are still shrouded by mystery, and in the case of Malagasy on Madagascar, the Austronesian family of Southeast Asia and Oceania - the language traces to speakers who travelled over the ocean from Borneo to Africa. This course will examine languages in all of these families, with a focus on how they demonstrate a wide array of linguistic processes and how they interact with social history, anthropology, and geography.
Like every other language, Cambodian is totally unique in some respects (these are of interest only to the language learner), and a representative human language in others (these are of interest to all students of language). Thus, for example, like every written language, Cambodian will exhibit diglossia: the grammar and the vocabulary of the written language will differ from that of the spoken language. It is also a member of a language family, known as Austroasiatic, whose members are spoken from NE India through Malaysia, Myanmar, and Indochina. In addition, Cambodian is a structural representative of a given type of language spoken throughout mainland Southeast Asia. That is, in many respects, the structure of Cambodian is similar to those of Lao, Thai, Vietnamese, as well as Hmong. In the “Far West” of SE Asia, are spoken other languages, among them Burmese, Mon, and Karen, which are still similar, but less so. All of these languages are isolating, monosyllabic languages. Of the languages just listed, only Vietnamese and Mon are genetically related to Cambodian. Finally, in its orthography and lexicon, Cambodian has borrowed so extensively from Indic languages, that all literate speakers have a considerable background in practical etymology, and recognize borrowings from , say, Pali, as English speakers generally do not recognize borrowings from Norman French or Latin or Greek. Since the Indic languages belong to Indoeuropean, some unexpected words in Cambodian (e.g. niam ,smaeu ) will turn out to have English cognates (like name, same). Your goal in this course is not to acquire a speaking knowledge of Khmer. (For that you would need a pedagogical grammar, a native-speaker instructor, and hours and hours of practice in the lab and in the classroom.) It is rather to understand from a linguist’s point of view what it is that makes this language a typical language of this part of the world. We will be working through a reference grammar of the language together. You are each also going to ‘adopt’ another mainland SE Asian language for purposes of comparison, to experience for yourself what it means for a language to be a member of a linguistic alliance or Sprachbund. You may select your own ‘pet’ language, and your assignment will then be to ‘master’ this language in the same way that you have ‘mastered’ Khmer.
Prerequisites: LING UN3101 LING W3101. Prerequisites: LING UN3101 How discourse works; how language is used: oral vs. written modes of language; the structure of discourse; speech acts and speech genres; the expression of power; authenticity; and solidarity in discourse, dialogicity, pragmatics, and mimesis
Prerequisites: LING UN3101 Reading and discussion of scholarly literature on the cognitive approach to language, including: usage-oriented approaches to language, frame semantics, construction grammar, theories of conceptual metaphor and mental spaces; alongside of experimental research on language acquisition, language memory, prototypical and analogous thinking, and the role of visual imagery in language processing
Prerequisites: LING UN3101 LING W3101. An investigation of the possible types of grammatical phenomena (argument structure, tense/aspect/mood, relative clauses, classifiers, and deixis). This typological approach is enriched by the reading of actual grammars of languages from Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas in which gramatical descriptions are read with an eye to important notional concepts of grammar: reference and categorization, case and role of arguments with predicates (ergativity), tense/aspect/mood. Discussion of meaning is combined with attention to expression (that is, morphology), which yanks our attention towards language change (grammaticalization)
Prerequisites: LING UN3101 LING W3101. Prerequisites: LING UN3101 An investigation of the sounds of human language, from the perspective of phonetics (articulation and acoustics, including computer-aided acoustic analysis) and phonology (the distribution and function of sounds in individual languages)
How language structure and usage varies according to societal factors such as social history and socioeconomic factors, illustrated with study modules on language contact, language standardization and literacy, quantitative sociolinguistic theory, language allegiance, language, and power
Prerequisites: LING UN3101 LING W3101. Prerequisites: LING UN3101 Syntax - the combination of words - has been at the center of the Chomskyan revolution in Linguistics. This is a technical course which examines modern formal theories of syntax, focusing on later versions of generative syntax (Government and Binding) with secondary attention to alternative models (HPSG, Categorial Grammar)
Source: Teachers College at Columbia University's catalog, linked per course · table learning_unit · CourseShelf publish 61
