Graduate Linguistics Courses

The aim of this course is to provide students with the skills necessary to contribute to our understanding of modern generative syntactic theory (although other theories may be introduced by professors from different theoretical backgrounds). An overview of the theory of early generative grammar and its attendant problems will be presented in this course. Attempts to resolve these issues in contemporary syntax via the minimalist program will be covered in as much depth as possible. Using the skills and arguments developed in this course, students will be required to do original research on a particular problem of syntax.

The goal of this course is to engage graduate students in an analysis of the competing theories of the methods for classifying the world's languages. The course will provide an historical overview of the field with a major emphasis on contemporary debates. At issue will be whether all languages can be reconstructed to a common source. Is there possible evidence for such a reconstruction? Can the methodology faithfully extend to the very remote past?

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 course provides a cross-disciplinary overview of language science approaches to bilingualism and second language learning.

This course will address professional development with attention to the unique nature of cross-disciplinary research. In addition, we will focus on the writing of journal articles and grant proposals, demystifying the grant and journal review process, acquiring skill in formal presentations at national and international conferences, the job market in the academy and industry, developing collaborations here and abroad, and learning to mentor undergraduate research students. The seminar will also provide training in the responsible conduct of research in a broader range of research settings than typically encountered within disciplinary graduate programs. Ethical conduct will form an integral part of students' research experiences as they work in research groups and laboratories here and abroad. The proseminar will address emerging issues such as security of digital data, as well as issues relevant for the component disciplines involved (e.g., recruitment of college students enrolled in foreign language courses; working with populations with communication disorders; ethical oversight of international collaborations).

Audio-lingual orientation.

Course objectives are to understand cross-linguistic tendencies in language change, gain familiarity with some of the more-studied phenomena of the diachrony of Spanish, and conduct analysis of a linguistic variable in data from historical texts or from a (community-based speech) corpus.

This course offers foundations of generative syntax. It addresses the advantage of a scientific model to explain human knowledge of language that also makes predictions about its representation in the mind.

Students will (1) become acquainted with the study of grammatical constructions and the cognitive and interactional processes that shape them, in their social context; (2) sample approaches in this area, including usage-based theory, grammaticalization, typology, construction grammar, interactional linguistics; and (3) drawing on the methods of linguistic variation analysis, gain practical skills for carrying out a quantitative morphosyntactic analysis of appropriate (speech) data. Students will learn to distill findings into suitable format for scholarly venues and, by the end of the course, should have a paper to submit as a conference abstract and develop for journal submission.

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.

An in-depth analysis of current research carried out on the acquisition of Spanish as a second language. Focus will be on syntax, phonology, lexicon, discourse, and pragmatics. Specific topics covered include the following: null-subjects, clitics; movement and word order, tense and aspect, mood, agreement features, grammaticalization, modality, negation, functional categories, tutored vs. untutored learners, UG vs. non-UG effects, the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy, markedness, cohesive devices, speech acts, metaphors, idioms, the lexicon and culture, the phonological systems, including suprasegmentals. In addition to developing an understanding of the current research on the acquisition of Spanish as a second language, students will learn how to read the research literature from a critical perspective and how to read empirical data presented in published research that might result in alternative interpretations from those espoused by authors of published work. This goal will be achieved in two ways: requiring students to submit via e-mail to the professor and other students in the seminar two- to three-page critiques of assigned readings; and oral presentations in class of readings selected by the student(s). Some of the critical reports and presentations will be carried out jointly, and others will be done individually. Students will also learn how to design and implement empirical research on the acquisition of Spanish as well as how to write up the results of this research in a potentially publishable research report. Finally, they will have the opportunity to present their research findings to the Penn State applied linguistics community, in a mini in-house workshop at the end of the course. In preparation for this, time will be set aside near the end of the seminar for students to present and discuss their research with their colleagues in the course. Most of the readings for the course will be preselected by the professor; however, students will also be expected to carry out independent reading of publications not included in the course syllabus and present and critique what they read in the seminar.

Early fragmentation among the peninsular dialects; their status today, Judeo-Spanish; descriptive analysis of modern Spanish American dialects.

Creative projects, including nonthesis research, which are supervised on an individual basis and which fall outside the scope of formal courses.

This seminar will provide an examination of codeswitching (CS), drawing on corpus- and lab-based methods. We will attend to bilinguals' linguistic experience and community norms as impacting the cognitive representation of language and thus linguistic structure. We will address (1) linguistic concerns with constraints on CS by asking: Is CS favored at particular syntactic and prosodic junctures of the two languages? and (2) psycholinguistic concerns with the facilitation of CS by asking: Is CS predicted by "triggering" (either situational, e.g., by the interlocutor, or linguistic, e.g. by cognates)? Rather than assume that bilingual patterns need be derivable from syntactic principles for monolingual grammar, our goal will be to identify bilingual CS strategies--quantitative preferences to switch at particular sites and structural adjustments for switching at dispreferred sites. Students will present and evaluate published articles; learn to extract and code data from spontaneously produced CS; and conduct a pilot study toward an original research proposal.

This course brings together research in sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and first and second language acquisition in order to prepare students to investigate how learners acquire and process sociolinguistic variation. The course will cover various corpus and experimental studies on the acquisition of variation and review how these studies inform models of L1 and L2 acquisition. The goal of the course is for students to draw from these various sub-disciplines of linguistics and create a project that integrates language variation and language acquisition.

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.

Psycholinguistics is increasingly an important branch of linguistics, supported by the exponential growth of the use of experimental methods in linguistic research, to examine the cognitive processes underlying human language. In this seminar we will examine psycholinguistics through the lens of bilingualism. Bilingualism is of interest for a number of reasons. First, despite the prevalence of monolinguals in the United States, most people of the world are bilingual. To develop a truly universal account of human cognition, it is essential to gain a detailed understanding of the relationship between language and thought in individuals who speak and comprehend multiple languages. It will be essential that research on basic cognitive functions in bilinguals examine both the course and the consequence of second language acquisition. The primary goal of this course will be to introduce the core themes of psycholinguistics, using multilingual speakers as the case study. We will begin with issues concerning the acquisition of core linguistic levels, continue with lexical (e.g. how do multilingual speakers process cognates [piano] and false cognates [fin]?) and sentence processing (e.g. How do the two languages influence each other in predictive processing or when resolving syntactic ambiguity?), and finish with the cognitive neural consequences of bilingualism on general cognition, examining both production and comprehension throughout. A secondary goal for the course is to help students become familiar with current experimental methods used in psycholinguistic and increasingly in traditional linguistic research, e.g. self-paced reading tasks, syntactic priming, eye-tracking methodologies, EEG recordings, and fMRI.

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.

The course provides an overview of topics and theories in second language acquisition (SLA), with a focus on the linguistic and cognitive aspects of learning a language during adulthood. The course will explore in depth the specificities of adult language learning (as opposed to L1 acquisition) through topics that include age effects, input processing, salience and attention, implicit/explicit learning, error prediction and feedback, social interaction, desirable difficulties, and individual-based differences. While most readings will be provided, students will be responsible for exploring a linguistic topic of their interest and for contributing additional papers. Students will be encouraged to build on previous and/or current interests and to pursue them within approaches to second language acquisition.

Usage-based approaches view linguistic knowledge as emerging from input experience and general cognitive mechanisms. This course explores second language learning and generalization, with a particular emphasis on the notion of constructions. By examining data from experimental methods and corpus linguistics, we will explore the question of how the distributional patterns of linguistic input affect the learnability of a second language. In problem sets, students will be introduced to essential skills for the computational analysis of text corpora (tagging; automatized extraction of n-grams, collocations, collostructions, etc.). Students will also complete an original project, analyzing the learnability of L2 constructions based on the quantitative analysis of linguistic data.

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.