Matthew Carlson

Have you ever failed to understand someone because they didn't use the word "whom" properly? There is often a big difference between how one is "supposed to" use a language, and how the language is actually used in the world. Where does this difference come from? Why are some ways of speaking considered to be more correct, more logical, or more polite, and others are disdained, discouraged, or ridiculed? More importantly, how do these judgments spread, and what are their consequences? In this course we will read and conduct rigorous linguistic (e.g. phonetic or syntactic) analyses of how Spanish is used in a wide range of communities both in countries where Spanish is the majority language as well as in the United States, we will apply methods from sociolinguistics to explore how linguistic variation is associated with social meanings, and we will critically examine how standard varieties are defined and promoted, and how nonstandard varieties are evaluated, both positively and negatively. We will also engage with points of view of Spanish users, community members, and others through critical study of literary works and other primary sources (e.g. social media, opinion writings, political statements, interviews), to listen to what different people say about varieties of Spanish, and about those who use those varieties. Through these efforts we will explore why languages vary and change, and how and why people come to be evaluated (negatively or positively, accurately, or inaccurately) on the basis of how they speak. Satisfies requirements for the major and minor in Spanish.

Students in this course will examine the shift from rule-based to constraint-based theories of phonology with an emphasis on analyzing the shortcomings and paradoxes inherent in earlier approaches. At issue will be the search for a better understanding of how the phonological component continually interacts with phonetics and morphology in order to create optimal outputs. Students will analyze particular problems through reading various journal articles treating the same topic from different approaches. They will then evaluate the various approaches systematically. The goal of this course is to prepare students to do close readings of advanced research.

This is a second graduate course in phonology, with a primary focus on Spanish. Our goals will be to understand the Spanish sound system in the context of phonological theory more generally, and to engage the field by generating and pursuing research questions that have the potential to contribute to advancing our knowledge of this topic. Our goals are both methodological and theoretical. Students will conduct focused explorations of the literature, generate research questions that build on our current knowledge, and develop strategies for answering those questions. Familiarity with the basic concepts of phonology, and with the major schools of thought in phonology (from LING 504) will be assumed.

This course is designed to help students become active participants in the use and development of quantitative data analysis in the language science community. Students will gain familiarity with basic statistical concepts and techniques as well as more advanced techniques that are commonly used in our field. More importantly, students will consider the motivations behind researchers’ choices in how to analyze their data, by reading contributions to the growing literature on quantitative methodology in language science, critiquing published work, and conducting their own analyses of published and unpublished data. The goal is to equip students with the tools to both begin analyzing their own data, and to expand their knowledge by critically examining current practice, and assessing new developments in our field.

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.

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.