This course introduces the Indo-European languages (ancient and modern) from historical and comparative perspectives. Our emphasis will be on the earliest representatives (Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Old Iranian, Hittite, Old English, etc.) including chief linguistic characteristics, writing systems, mythology, and early texts; nature of the reconstructed Indo-European language and culture will be an important subfocus. One or more Indo-European languages will be investigated in detail.

This course explores the French sound system through the lens of English phonetics, offering a deep dive into the similarities and differences between the two languages. Students will study vowel and consonant production, acoustic and articulatory properties, and suprasegmental features like syllable structure and intonation. The course begins with foundational phonetic theories and examines pronunciation instruction in L2 courses. Through hands-on practice with phonetic software and analysis of real-world data, students will gain critical skills for understanding language acquisition and pronunciation challenges in L2 learners.

How do adults learn new languages? Why do some people learn new languages easily, while others struggle? What can language teachers do to make the learning experience as successful as possible? The course addresses these and related questions by providing a critical introduction to recent theories of instructed second language acquisition (ISLA). We will reflect on these issues through readings and discussion, and we will engage them on a practical level through one-on-one ESL tutorials with participants from the greater Princeton community, in collaboration with ProCES.

An introduction to the scientific analysis of the structure and uses of language. Core areas covered include phonetics and phonology, morphology, the lexicon, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, with data from a wide range of languages. Additional topics may include language acquisition, language and the brain, and language change.

This course introduces DEAF+WORLD, a world where people speak with their hands and hear with their eyes. It is for students who are interested in learning basic American Sign Language (ASL). Students will acquire basic vocabulary and grammar through interactive activities in order to develop conversational skills in ASL. Students also will practice using body language to effectively communicate with Deaf people while having minimal signing skills. In addition, the basics of Deaf culture and Deaf American history will be discussed.

This course is concerned with linguistic meaning, i.e., the way speakers of a language associate interpretations to expressions in that language. After defining basic semantic relations among sentences, we go on to investigate the way the meaning of sentences is constructed based on the meanings of their parts. We consider a range of linguistic phenomena to incrementally build up our framework, including brief excursions into pragmatics and psycholinguistics. To help us be precise we will use the tools of Propositional and Predicate Logic as well as lambda calculus.

This course delves into the internal composition of words (morphology) across languages. What is a word? What can be inside of a word? Do all languages build words in the same way(s), with the same sorts of ingredients? How similar is word-building to sentence-building? We will engage deeply with both the empirical and theoretical side of this topic, exploring not just morphology, but also its interactions with phonology (sound systems) and syntax (sentence structure). This class will be highly interactive and hands-on, and students will develop tools of analysis and argumentation that are applicable in all areas of linguistics and beyond.

The course covers the linguistic, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, and sociolinguistic aspects of bilingualism. We examine language acquisition in monolingual and bilingual children, the notion of "critical age" for language acquisition, definitions and measurements of bilingualism, and the verbal behavior of bilinguals such as code-switching. We consider the effects of bilingualism on other cognitive domains, including memory, and examine neurolinguistic evidence comparing the brains of monolinguals and bilinguals. Societal and governmental attitudes toward bilingualism in countries like India and the U.S. are contrasted.

This course provides a thorough intro to the principles and practice of linguistic fieldwork. Students will be trained in methods of language description and analysis based on data provided by a native speaker of an unfamiliar language. A wide range of topics will be covered, from data collection techniques to the theoretically informed analysis of the collected data, and all major subfields of linguistics will be involved. Course is designed for students interested in documentary/descriptive linguistic work and those interested in incorporating linguistics data into research in theoretical linguistics.

In this course we will examine a wide range of phonological phenomena from languages across the world, building on the introduction offered in LIN 301.We will explore ways to analyze these phenomena from multiple theoretical approaches. The focus is on developing satisfying analyses of interesting phonological patterns, drawing on existing theoretical tools where they are useful. Our goal is not to use linguistic data to try to justify any particular theory, but to see how various tools of phonological analysis can be used to simplify sound patterns which can be quite complex on the surface.

This course develops students' syntactic reasoning abilities beyond the introductory level, providing new tools for analyzing the syntactic components of linguistics phenomena. We read and discuss both classic and contemporary syntactic research on a variety of topics, including syntactic issues in word order, case, and argument structure. Students apply these tools to a broad set of linguistic data, from a variety of languages, both in and out of the classroom. The course culminates in each student writing a "squib", in which they test multiple hypotheses on a syntactic phenomenon of their choice.

Offered as an overview of the social, cultural, and political aspects that forge linguistic variation in the Spanish-speaking world, students discuss issues of power, identity, globalization, policymaking, social status, gender, and ideology to understand cases of linguistic variation and change. Students will recognize particular features distinguishing one dialect from another, while gaining knowledge of the development of these differences. This course will enrich a student's view of Spanish as a social construct, either as a native/heritage speaker or as a Spanish learner, and will allow students to develop their analytical skills.

This course will provide an in-depth understanding of Machine Translation from computational and linguistic perspectives, spanning classical to Generative AI paradigms. We will discuss techniques for automated processing of human language (morphological, syntactic and semantic analysis, tagging, and language generation) with in-class programming exercises. We will cover latest techniques for scalable language technologies in production-scale applications. Projects will involve implementing components of speech/text technologies, identifying limitations, developing improvements, or any other topic relevant to human language processing.