SPAN 597 Theorizing Multilingualism

There is now widespread recognition that most humans speak more than one language. This has contributed to increasing criticism of monolingual bias in linguistic theorizing and to the acknowledgment that a full understanding of the human language capacity must include multilingualism. In this course we will survey what has become a wide array of theoretical approaches to multilingualism, seeking to identify the major questions to be answered, and asking what kinds of data can help us answer them. In course projects, we will seek to advance our theoretical understanding through both exploratory data analysis and hypothesis testing.