This Seminar is available to all students. No background required.  Recommended for students interested in contemporary formal linguistics.

A better title for this course would be “Why are natural languages so similar?”… The overarching goal is to demonstrate these similarities and to show that differences across languages are predictable to some degree. The reason we cannot predict everything is partly because the field is still very young, and partly because linguists are still much in disagreement as to what can and cannot exist. Lately, it has become quite fashionable to deny the existence of language universals (at the end of the course, we will read and discuss a series of papers on that topic); at the risk of being behind the times, we will still look into the concepts and ideas which underlie the study of language universals and use those concepts to understand the universal design of natural language. In many linguistics courses this is done by examining one language; in this course, we will be looking at a number of languages.

The course will cover the following core areas (their lit does not reflect the order of issues we will discuss):

A.         Phenomena:  word order; case marking; agreement; lexical categories (functional vs notional; noun-verb distinction); special status of subject/topic and the structure of the left periphery of the clause; cross-clausal dependencies

B.         Tools: basics of linguistic analysis, sampling techniques, universals, hierarchies.

C.         Explanations: why are languages similar?—is that an illusion, a consequence of universal grammar, a consequence of functional and communicative pressures, a consequence of general cognitive constraints (~processing), all/none of the above?