Courses With Pre-Requisites: Subject to Term Availability
Develops skills in language analysis by focusing on reading and writing of linguistic argumentation. Explores the foundations of such argumentation in the core areas of linguistics. Students read and discuss primary literature in linguistics in order to understand how to formulate hypotheses and evaluate them. They also learn how to use writing to construct their own solutions to challenging linguistic problems. Prerequisite: LING 220. Writing/Quantitative.
A systematic approach to the study of linguistic variation in different areal, social, and cultural settings. This course aims to explore the phenomenon of language use in social contexts. The course, designated as writing-intensive, covers topics such as: Languages, Dialects, and Contexts; Speech Communities, Communities of Practice, and Social Networks; Language in Context; Theory and Methods; Multilingualism and Language Contact; Sociolinguistics and Social Justice. Prerequisite: LING 282W. Recommended: LING 160. Writing.
Explores how language works in human cognition. Investigates how people produce and understand language (whether written, spoken or signed). Uses evidence from the production and comprehension of speech sounds, words, and sentences to introduce psychological and cognitive systems for human language. Prerequisite: LING 220.
An overview of theoretical principles in phonology. The foundations of phonological theory will be taught through readings and practical work. Data analysis will cover a variety of languages as well as child phonological acquisition. The nature of phonetic and phonological representation, complementation and contrast, and phonological processes will form the overall conceptual focus. The significance of linguistic units such as phoneme, syllable, morpheme, word, and phrase will be considered in the context of phonological theory. Extensive practice with language data will be the focus of the work required in the course. Both examinations and homework problems will require analytical work and the formulation of results in prose. Students’ work will be assessed on measures of careful and logical analysis and clear written expression. Prerequisite: LING 282W.
Introduces theories of sentence structure. This course introduces the major issues in syntactic theory within the generative framework along the lines of Principles and Parameters, and Minimalism. Topics to be covered include principles that govern the derivation of phrases and sentence structures, syntactic conditions on the interpretation of different types of noun phrases, motivation and constraints on movement, and locality conditions. The theoretical concepts introduced in this course will be employed in the analysis of empirical data drawn not only from English but also from many different languages. Prerequisite: LING 282W
Basic formal aspects of meaning (e.g. compositional semantics, truth conditional semantics and quantification in natural language) and how they are distinguished from pragmatic aspects of meaning. People use sentences to mean things: to convey information about themselves and about states of affairs in the world. This class introduces the study of how meaning is encoded and expressed in natural language. We will examine basic concepts in the study of meaning, including reference, denotation, word meaning, truth-conditions, inference relations, logical connectives, predication, quantification, modality, evidentiality, tense, and aspect. We will also discuss pragmatic aspects of meaning, including conversational implicatures, speech acts, and deixis. The theoretical concepts introduced in this course will be employed in the analysis of empirical data drawn not only from English but also from other languages. Prerequisite: LING 282W. Quantitative.
A survey of methods of speech sound description and transcription. An introduction to the science of phonetics, with a particular focus on the acoustic properties of speech. A variety of issues in speech production, digital analysis of speech, speech perception, and applications of speech research will be addressed. The course makes extensive use of concepts from basic physics. Exams and assignments require computational skills. Prerequisite: LING 282W.
LING 350: First Language Acquisition
Introduces the study of language acquisition from the point of view of linguistic structure. This course explores how infants and young children acquire the structure of language. We will explore the acquisition of phonetic and phonological patterns, how words are learned, and how children acquire syntactic and morphological knowledge (e.g., English past tense). The course will also investigate some examples of atypical language development, bilingualism / second-language learning in children, and child language acquisition in indigenous languages of North America. Both theoretical approaches and methodology will be covered, and course projects are designed to help students learn how to apply concepts from the science of first language acquisition to generate practical exercises and demonstrations with young children in our community. Prerequisite: LING 282W.
Theoretical and practical aspects of second language learning. An overview of some of the major issues and research findings in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). It will help you understand their importance in the context of the adult second language classroom. We will cover topics on theory and research in SLA: input and interaction, learner variation (age, motivation, experience, and aptitude), learner output, and second language teaching methods. Students will have the opportunity to reflect on their own experiences as language learners, as well as to evaluate methods of SLA pedagogy. Prerequisite: LING 282W.
Implementation of linguistic principles in the teaching of English as a second language, including classroom teaching practice with adult learners of English. This course is graded on a pass/fail basis. There is a supervised practicum in a local adult ESL classroom where you will observe and assist for at least 25 hours and teach independently for at least 10 of those 25 hours. Your teaching will be evaluated jointly by your sponsoring teacher and by a practicum observer from SFU (either Claudia Wong or another experienced evaluator). A series of mandatory workshops will be held. Participants must attend all workshops in order to receive credit for the course. Missing even one will mean “F” in the course unless you have compelling documented evidence of extenuating (i.e., beyond your control) circumstances to justify your absence. Prerequisite: LING 360, LING 362. Also required: Registration in the CESL Certificate program.
Advanced training in speech sound description and analysis in the impressionistic and instrumental modes. This course is a continuation of the basic introduction to phonetics (LING 330) and will provide a more detailed survey of some areas in acoustic, auditory, and articulatory phonetics. Topics to be covered include vocal tract acoustics, speaker normalization, coarticulation, prosody, theories of speech perception and auditory word recognition, neurophonetics, the phonetics of second language acquisition, as well as computerized methods for speech analysis and speech perception testing methods. In addition, a number of ‘hands on’ projects will be part of the course. Prerequisite: LING 330.
Application of principles from phonetics to a number of practical problems in such areas as second language learning and teaching, forensics, communications, commerce and the arts. An overview of research and applications in contemporary forensic phonetics. We will read and discuss a selection of original articles from leading journals covering voice analysis and description, earwitness testimony, forensic voice comparison, vocal disguise, content determination, and Bayesian logic. Hands-on assignments will illustrate analysis techniques. We will also examine research designs used in phonetic investigations, and discuss statistical procedures. Prerequisite: LING 321 or LING 330, and 9 additional units of upper division Linguistics.
Explores language as a system of the human brain, including specific topics such as the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of language; language production, perception and processing; bilingualism, language learning and brain plasticity; and aphasia, dyslexia, deafness and sign languages. Students will master basic neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of language-related systems in the brain in the first weeks of the course, and also study cognitive neuroscience methods used to study the brain. In subsequent weeks, research studies are surveyed with the broader goal of understanding how the brain processes language. Examples applications for this knowledge are also discussed, including how the brain develops in infancy, how language faculties recovers from brain damage (aphasia), how the brain ‘reads’ orthographic systems, and how neuroscientific design principles could be used to create tools that extract and interpret phonological, semantic, and syntactic information from brain activation. Prerequisite: 12 units of upper division linguistic courses.
Introduction to theoretical and applied issues in the computational processing of natural language. This course is an introduction to theoretical and applied issues in computational linguistics. Computational Linguistics, or Natural Language Processing (NLP), refers to the processing of human languages through computers, which is mostly an applied venture. The course also covers theoretical aspects, such as the computational modeling of language processing phenomena, and it overlaps with research in psychology and neurolinguistics. In this course, we will survey the field and study a few specific applications. Classes will consist of lectures, drawing on material from the main textbooks, but also from other sources (to be distributed throughout the semester). In each class, there will also be a practicum, where we will test and implement algorithms in the Natural Language Processing Tool Kit and the spaCy library, and will experiment with existing natural language processing systems. Prerequisite: LING 250 or SDA 250.