SPAN 597 More together: Multilingualism and the nature of human language

Most humans can be considered speakers of two or more languages, but linguistic theory has generally attempted to explain multilingualism as a special case, implicitly viewing monolingualism as more fundamental. In this course we explore a different perspective, namely that human language is fundamentally variable, multivalent, and plural, or in other words, multilingual. Through readings of theoretical proposals and critiques of published work we will explore the implications of this perspective for our understanding of the nature of human language at the most basic level. Students will develop their thinking through short essays, responses to published work, and in course projects designed to advance our theoretical understanding of language through both exploratory data analysis and hypothesis testing, probing the cutting edge of this topic and developing their abilities to ground their empirical work in well-developed theoretical reasoning.