Course schedule

Spring 2008 Suzanne Kemmer

The schedule below is subject to revision. I have included the topics we would ideally discuss, as they relate to the overarching historical currents in the field and the relation of particular ideas to these, but we may not have time for all. Moreover, other interesting topics might come up that relate to the students' backgrounds and studies, which may displace some of the less central topics below. I will revise the syllabus as we go on to reflect the topics we actually discuss in depth.

DayDate Topic Readings and Assignments
TuJan 8 Introduction. Overview of landmarks in linguistic ideas in the west. Greeks; medieval views; 16th-18th century grammarians; von Humboldt; early comparative-historical linguists (Bopp, Grimm, Schleicher); to progression of key players below. Big picture: Repeated swings between focus on variation (and lack of constraints on it) vs. focus on universal similarities / commonalities in human lgs/cultures. No required reading. Recommended as overview reading: Pedersen (1931) Ch. 1 & 2

ThJan 10 O&B 1. The "Neogrammarian Manifesto". Comparative linguistics becomes 'Modern Linguistics'. Critiques of earlier phase of comparative linguistics. What is Linguistics, Take 1. Call to establish Linguistics as a science, Take 1. Osthoff and Brugmann (1878)

TuJan 15 O&B 2. Regularity of Sound change. Regularity (generalization) and science. Call to investigate present-day "dialects" (but: largely limited to Europe). Uniformitarianism: languages of ancient times were not fundamentally different, in nature, function, or diachronic processes, from modern languages. Osthoff and Brugmann (1878) cont.

ThJan 17 O&B 3. More on sound change; seeds of sociolinguistics. Sound laws (regularity) vs. principled exceptions (analogy; other sporadic but known processes). Accounting for other exceptions: borrowing. Modern controversy: exceptionless but slow change (leaving residues in population that look non-regular but had just not spread all the way through speech community) vs. lexical diffusion (stepwise spread through lexicon). Attempts to resolve the controversy: Labov and Bybee posit division in phonological processes that lead to different historical effects ("Neogrammarian sound change" vs. other types of sound changes). But: divisions are different--so far, there is no universally agreed typology of sound changes in terms of regularity and spread as far as I know, but I am not a sociolinguist). Osthoff and Brugmann (1878) cont.

TuJan 22 de Saussure 1. Casting off the diachronic. The beginnings of structuralism. What is Linguistics, Take 2. A new distinction: 'A Language' (Langue) as a system of social Signs (form-meaning units), vs. Speaking (Parole), the speech actions of the individual. de Saussure (1916)

ThJan 24 de Saussure 2. The Saussurian view of how language works. Fundamental principles/properties of language in general: What is language, Take 1. What is the proper study of Linguistics--how do we cut out the related but inessential aspects of human language so that we can properly look at a coherent and investigable part of it. de Saussure (1916) cont.

TuJan 29 de Saussure 3. The Sign as a psychological yet simultaneously social unit: An associative link between 'concept' (Signifié) and 'sound image' (Signifiant), but only the part shared by a some community. The arbitrariness of the Sign, Take 1. de Saussure (1916) cont.

ThJan 31 de Saussure 4. Relations of the Sign to newer ideas about language: Phoneme/allophone; Competence vs. performance; mirror neurons linking phonological perception with motor articulations. Two dimensions of language: Synchrony and diachrony. Mutability and immutability of the Sign. (We did not get to: Is language like a chess game? Or subsequent developments of Saussurian structuralism.) de Saussure (1916). Recommended: Harris and Taylor 1989, aalso Greenberg 1968 for in-depth discussion of Saussure's chess game analogy and a way of applying the synchrony/diachrony that links them and maximizes generalization.

TuFeb 5 Boas 1. Boas synthesizes phonetics knowledge and makes it into a useful typological/descriptive framework for any language. Background on 19th century ideas of typology: morphological typology. Isolating, agglutinating, polysynthetic, fusional (synthetic) . Boas as start of a modern and empirical investigation of language structure. 19th century ideas of race, language and culture; persistence and misuse in 20th century. Boas (1911), 31-79 First response essay due Tuesday

ThFeb 7 Boas 2. Boas' demonstration of the logical independence of race ("physical type"), language, culture. Some hypotheses on what happened in the history of the human race. Race as the oldest divergence with the most persistent features (although in more recent times mixing has occurred); language as the next most persistent; and culture as very malleable and easiest to borrow from other groups, thereby potentially quickly changing the borrowing group's culture to adopt not only material culture, but social/cultural structures Boas (1911) cont.
TuFeb 12 Boas 3. Sound structure. "Sound blindness." Grammatical categories. Class question: What is Boas best known for today. Boas (1911) cont.

ThFeb 14 Boas 4. Grammatical categories. Obligatory categories and their implications for relation of language and thought. Adds a more scientific, systematic investigation of languages to address the Humboldtian question of how a person's thoughts relate to their language and/or culture--Big Question #1 in Linguistics, stripped bare of folk ideas assuming tight correspondence of language, thought, culture, aligning with presumed scale of cultural superiority. A survey of some grammatical categories/concepts, including some very unfamiliar to Europeans. Boas claim: essential cognitive sameness of humans, thus: all lexical and grammatical categories observed are POTENTIALLY available to all languages, if the cultural conditions are right, i.e. if people need to learn them, they will be able to and the language will adapt its structures to the new concepts. Wide variation in categorization due to differences in culture/environment. Does Boas' view entail universality of certain concepts at a pan-human level? e.g. number concepts? (if so, possible problem with Piraha.) Class question: What is the relation of "Language of Thought" posited by Pinker, Fodor, and Pylyshyn (symbolic, predicate-logic type cognitive system) , to Boas's ideas on universals? (Boas said nothing about combining categories, just looked at them paradigmatically, so we don't know if he would have gone for a logic-type "underlying universal grammar" or "universal logical form". Open question: Would he have believed in pre-existing cognitive categories? Introductory on Neo-Whorfians, who see a balance between universalism (universal pre-linguistic cognitive categories) and wide variation in possible lexical and grammatical structures that can influence cognitive processing. Boas (1911)

TuFeb 19 Sapir 1. What is language, Take 2. How is it different from other human social and cultural phenomena? Sapir continues the Boasian descriptivist tradition but adds another universalist overlay. Sapir (1921), Ch. 1, 3-23, Ch. 2, 24-41.

ThFeb 21Sapir 2. The word and its structure. Types of morphemes. Sound categories of language. Two levels of sounds: the "ideal" (= idealized, in-the-mind) sound system, vs. actual sound productions. Establishment of the seminal concept of the phoneme. Sapir (1921): Our focus will be on continuation of pages 24-41 and on 53-56. Pages 42-53, to note 15, are recommended as useful background reading if this material is not familiar to you.]
TuFeb 26 Sapir 3. Categorization of sounds and words. Lexical categorization and its implications. Typological properties of languages. Sapir (1921) Ch. 4, 56-82

ThFeb 28 Sapir 4. Kinds of concepts (meaning units) and their relation to linguistic form. Expanding Meillet's lexical vs. grammatical words contrast into 4 concept types with prototypically corresponding form types. Sapir (1921) Ch. 5, 82-119
TuMar 4 Midterm recess. No class.
ThMar 6 Midterm recess. No class.
TuMar 11 Bloomfield 1. Bloomfield's model of communication: Basic sketch of a linguistic event. Relation of Bloomfieldian linguistics to new 20th century intellectual currents: materialism; logical positivism; behaviorism. Despite the new currents, Bloomfield's approach maintains faithfulness to Boasian descriptivism. [If time, comparison with Karl Bühler's 1930s model] Bloomfield (1933), Chapter 2
ThMar 13 Bloomfield 2. Linguistics as a science, Take 2. Bloomfield's (1933) conception of meaning. [If time, comparison with Bloomfield (1914).] Behaviorist description of meaning in terms of external behaviors. Bloomfield's critique of Wundt's 'mentalism' vs. early behaviorism. Later contrast: Skinnerian behaviorism vs. modern mentalism (cognitivism). Bloomfield (1933), Chapter 2 cont., Chapter 9 Second response essay due Thursday night 11:50 p.m.

TuMar 18 Whorf 1. Big Question #1, how do linguistic categories relate to a) categories of thought; b) process of thought. Introduction of covert categories (no overt markers, but discernible differences in linguistic behavior). Larger contrast: "Primitive" vs. "civilized modern" societies. Whorf's elevation of the "primitive". (Impulse seems similar to Boas' egalitarianism; but preference is now tilted toward the "primitive".) Whorf (1956) Thinking in Primitive Communities, 65-86

ThMar 20 Whorf 2. More on overt vs. covert categories ("cryptotypes"). Excursus: example from typology: Shape-based linguistic categories. Types of nominal classification: numeral classifier systems; noun classification/gender systems (involving agreement); possessive classifiers. [There is a 4th type, generic classifiers]. Descriptivist tradition continued. Whorf (1956) Grammatical Categories, pp. 87-101

TuMar 25 Whorf 3. More on various classification systems. Excursus/exemplification: Verb systems; transitivity. Relation of basic clause constructions (transitive; intransitive) to verb classes. Specific and generic grammatical categories. Whorf's call for comparison of "similar specific categories". Implication: taking grammatical typology beyond the "morphological typology"--morpheme structure of the word--dominant since Schleicher. Seeds of modern functional-typological approach to grammar (Greenberg, Givón, Comrie and subsequent) Whorf (1956), above readings cont.

ThMar 27 Whorf 4. Picking up some issues regarding relation of language (lexical and/or grammatical patterns), thought, and culture. Universalists, Whorfians, and neo-Whorfians. End of discussion of Big Question #1 in Linguistics: how language relates to mind/thought and culture. Transition to Big Question #2. (Possible Neo-Whorfian reading: Lucy 2002)

TuApr 1 Hockett 1. Big Question #2 in Linguistics (implied in Sapir, but central from Hockett to present-day linguistics): What, if anything, is unique about human language, as a system of communication? Is it qualitatively different from animal communication? or just different in degree, in specifiable ways. Discussion of some parameters that relate and distinguish human language from various animal communication systems. The vocal/auditory channel. Displacement. Reciprocality. Establishing Linguistics as a science, Take 3. Hockett (1958-59) Thumbnail bio due Tuesday

ThApr 3 Spring recess. No class.

TuApr 8 Hockett 2. More on the "Design Features" of Language. Which features are found, and to what extent, in various animal systems. Which, if any, are unique to human language. What is "Duality of Patterning". Arbitrariness, Take 2 Hockett (1958-59)

ThApr 10 Hockett 3. Transition. The shift in Linguistics from the idea of Unlimited Variation (associated with relativity, strong in 1940s-1950s) to Universals. Hockett on universals of language. Ferguson, Greenberg, Dobbs Ferry Conference on Language Universals. Beginning of the Greenbergian approach to language universals, continuing in Stanford Language Universals project (1970s); Cologne Universals project (1980s); Eurotyp project (1990s). Hockett (1963). Published in 1963, but presented in 1961

TuApr 15 Further transition. Social science perspective (1940s and 50s) vs. symbolic computational perspective (50s and 60s). Shift from the social group as the object of study to the individual (or representative individual) mind. The computational/symbolic approach gains ground in American linguistics. Europeans interested in theory remain largely Jakobsonian/Prague School structuralists. Earlier strands persist: European language family specialists: philologists (19th century traditions continuing into 20th); dialectologists (following Neogrammarian call); grammarians (following centuries long traditions; prescriptivism hardly gives way to descriptivism even this late)]. The basic Chomskyan model. "Grammaticality". Rules. Inspiration from computational process (von Neumann architecture). Symbol processing. Chomsky (1956).

ThApr 17 Chomsky's Aspects model. Autonomy of syntax. The origins of Chomsky's interests, model, and what he considers the primary questions or problems of Linguistics. Nativism. What makes humans unique: "The language gene" and the syntactic structural constraints it imposes. (Later: Parameter-setting model, allowing for more variation than previously, and input from experience/learning). How it got there: mutation, but no evolution. The competence/performance distinction. Universals. Chomsky's recent foray into question of evolution of language; what makes language unique (current specific answer: recursion as a structural principle of language). Controversies. Chomsky (1965) Third response essay due Thursday night 11:50 p.m.

TuApr 22 Summary; pulling ideas together. More on current controversies.

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