This course offers an introduction to Semantics, the subfield of linguistics that considers the different ways meaning is encoded in human language and the context within which language is used. The aim of the course is to introduce students to some of the basic concepts and central issues and scholars in the field. The course examines possible ways of describing and formalizing meaning at the level of the word, phrase, and sentence. The course naturally incorporates students’ understanding of syntax and morphology thereby fostering a more holistic understanding of linguistic analysis. It also provides the foundation for more specialised studies in Semantics and Pragmatics. Topics include: sense and reference, compositionality, lexical relations, entailment, presupposition, event types, thematic roles, deixis, implicature, predicate logic, and quantification.

We live in a world of language technology – who can imagine life without search engines, translation software and automated captioning? At the same time, more and more linguists use computational methods in their research. For example, this methodology can allow us to find all the ways the adverb actually is actually used, or to generate all monosyllabic six-character words for a psycholinguistic experiment. At the heart of this is computer programming: giving precise instructions for your computer to carry out – repeatedly and accurately. This course introduces the basic components of computer programming in Python for linguists.

An introduction to linguistic variation and its social implications, especially the quantitative study of phonological and grammatical features and their correlations with age, sex, ethnicity and other social variables.

This course introduces students to the basic grammar of classical Sanskrit. Students will engage with its phonology (including pronunciation, sandhi, and metrics) and morphology (including word formation, nominal declension and verbal conjugation, and dissolving compounds). Students will apply their grammatical knowledge and analytic skills to the reading of basic Sanskrit texts. By the end of the course, students will be able to read simple, narrative Sanskrit. This course is cross-listed with SAN291Y5 and can be used to count toward the Major Program’s Language Requirement.

This course provides a richly rewarding opportunity for students in their second year to work in the research project of a professor in return for 299H course credit. Students enrolled have an opportunity to become involved in original research, learn research methods and share in the excitement and discovery of acquiring new knowledge. Participating faculty members post their project descriptions for the following summer and fall/winter sessions in early February and students are invited to apply in early March. See Experiential and International Opportunities for more details.

This courses provides a richly rewarding opportunity for students in their second year to work in the research project of a professor in return for 299Y course credit. Students enrolled have an opportunity to become involved in original research, learn research methods and share in the excitement and discovery of acquiring new knowledge. Participating faculty members post their project descriptions for the following summer and fall/winter sessions in early February and students are invited to apply in early March. See Experiential and International Opportunities for more details.

An introductory survey of the theory and practice of contrastive analysis. How are languages compared with respect to their phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic structure? How are lexicons compared? Focusing on contrastive procedures, students will examine a number of case studies and will then apply this knowledge to produce their own analysis. Some consideration will be given to the usefulness of contrastive analysis to foreign language teaching.

Developments in linguistic theory sprouted diverse approaches to linguistic analysis of literature, from early formalism and structuralism to cognitive linguistics and functional linguistics. Survey of major trends and issues in linguistic poetics includes essential readings, such as works of R. Jakobson, M.A.K. Halliday, R. Barthes, and practice in linguistic analysis of literary texts.

Do numbers and statistics make your vision go blurry? Do you avoid making eye contact with charts and tables? From measuring vowel formants to gradient grammaticality judgments to frequencies and patterns in natural language corpora, research in linguistics is becoming increasingly dependent on quantitative data and argumentation... but fear not! In this course, students with no prior background in statistics will learn the fundamentals of quantitative reasoning through hands-on experience with contemporary statistical tools and will be equipped with the basic numeracy skills necessary to critically evaluate quantitative arguments in a range of subfields of linguistics.

This course examines current issues in phonetics and/or phonology specific to English. Depending on the instructor, the focus of the course may be oriented towards topics such as socio-phonetics; acquisition; dialectal variation; historical developments. This course counts towards only the English Language Linguistics Minor (ERMIN1200); it does NOT count towards the Linguistic Studies Minor (ERMIN0506) nor the Linguistic Studies Major (ERMAJ1850).

This course provides an overview of the fundamentals of acoustics, as well as the acoustic properties of vowels and consonants. Students will gain hands-on experience with primary acoustic data analysis through laboratory work, and will be exposed to classic and current research in the field. Additional topics that may be addressed include speech perception, second-language phonetics, and clinical applications.

Basic issues in current phonological theory. Problems focusing on analysis and theory. (Students who want to pursue graduate studies in linguistics are strongly advised to include this course in their program.)

An introduction to the foundations and formal framework of current generative grammar, concentrating on Chomsky's Minimalist theory. (Students who want to pursue graduate studies in linguistics are strongly advised to include this course in their program.) Formerly LIN331H5. 

25,000 is a modest estimate of the number of verbs with distinct meanings in English, but there are more likely upwards of 75,000 verbs. The number of nouns is three to four times this number. But how do we know what they all mean and how to use them appropriately? What is the nature of this knowledge? The meaning of words has been central to the study of language since the Ancient Greek and Sanskrit grammarians and philosophers, and it remains central to contemporary approaches to natural language. In this course, students will investigate basic issues and concepts in the linguistic study of word meaning, with a special focus on the relation between the semantics of words and their syntactic behaviour. Depending on the instructor, topics discussed in the course may include componential analysis; Lexical Conceptual Semantics; Cognitive Semantics; lexicalization patterns and differences cross-linguistically; categorization; compositionality; child language acquisition; computational applications.

This course examines the sub-field of linguistics known as pragmatics, an area concerned not only with what is said but, more importantly, with what is meant. Depending on the instructor, topics in this course may include implicature, reference, presupposition, speech acts, information structure, inferential relations, and static versus dynamic approaches to meaning. The course objectives are to i) explore in depth the concepts necessary to understand the theory of pragmatics, ii) define key terms used by linguists carrying out research in this area, and iii) connect theoretical and methodological concepts to every-day experiences of language in use.

How is a search engine able to answer so many of your questions? Why does your phone know which word you're about to type next in your message? Such technologies rely on computational linguistics, the intersection of Linguistics and the Computing Sciences. In this course, students with a background in either discipline will be introduced to this field. The course has a practical focus: how to get computers to analyze and process natural language? Through lectures and scaffolded programming assignments, students will be introduced to the tools and resources of Computational Linguistics (and their limitations). We will look at techniques used by computational linguists to process large amounts of text to answer practical and theoretical research questions. Topics may include part of speech tagging, parsing, machine translation, sentiment analysis, visualization, and corpus linguistics. While no programming skills are required at the outset, students should expect to develop them through the practicums of the course.

How can you get a computer to tell grammatical and ungrammatical sentences apart? How does it know whether 'cricket' refers to the game or the insect in a sentence like "The cricket jumped over the fence"? This course is designed to introduce students with either a background in Linguistics or in the Computing Sciences to the intersection of linguistics and computing, with a focus on the question of how computational algorithms and data structures can be used as a formal model of language. Topics may include finite-state automata for phonology and morphology, context-free grammars, semantic parsing, vector space semantics, computational cognitive modelling, and computational sociolinguistics. No programming skills are required to take the course.

This course prepares students to engage with English language linguistics in public settings. Students will critically analyze what role the English language has in society, and learn how linguists can help answer the public’s questions about the English language. Topics may include: what common misconceptions the general public has about language; the disconnect between what linguistics is and what the public wants to know about language, and how to bridge between this gap; dismantling English-supremacist attittudes and linguistic prejudices around the world; designing research to assess public attitudes about language.

This course introduces students to the nature and uses of discourse analysis, notably the types of data on which it draws and its descriptive and critical goals. Topics addressed include discourse structures, participants in discourse, links across texts, the role of medium, and the importance of intention and interpretation.

The best estimate of linguists suggests that English is spoken (natively and non-natively) by around one billion people today. This makes it the most widely spoken language in the world. Within this language exists a high degree of global dialect diversity. In this course, we will examine the structure and history of Englishes around the world including British, North American, Antipodean, Caribbean, African, and Asian varieties. Students will also consider structural and sociolinguistic issues associated with English as a global language including creolization, post-creolization, the diffusion of innovation, language policy, and the linguistic effects of colonialism. 

The grammars of living languages are constantly changing, never so obviously than when we compare different stages of a language over a long period of time: words change form and are sometimes repurposed; new words enter and others are lost; morphology rises and falls; syntactic possibilities can change dramatically. How do such changes arise, and what does it mean for a language to change? The aim of this course is to introduce students to the field of diachronic linguistics: its relationship to general linguistics, its primary research methods, and its major achievements. Students will gain practical experience solving classic language change problems, performing their own analyses, and reading contemporary literature in the field.

This course examines languages recently created by means of contact between languages of different socio-economical status. Analysis of these new languages is of particular interest to linguistic theory since it offers insight on the construction of linguistic systems, language evolution and on how language is acquired in such a context. Emphasis is given to the description and analysis of French-based pidgins and Creoles spoken in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean region.

Students develop critical reading and writing skills through the analysis of influential articles that broach broad and controversial topics in linguistics. One goal of the course is to develop skill in understanding how a text “works”, to form a reasoned evaluation of it, and to appreciate its place in a larger debate. Another goal is to develop skill in communicating complex ideas through a variety of means relevant to the academic community.

This course explores the linguistic features and characteristics of African languages. Attention will be given to the phonetic, phonological, morphological, and syntactic components of the languages to be studied, with emphasis on examining under-represented and under-studied languages. No prior knowledge of an African language is necessary.

This course offers a linguistic introduction to the features and characteristics of the Chinese languages. Attention will be given to the phonological, morphological and syntactic patterns of the language family, set against the backdrop of its linguistic and sociolinguistic history. The course not only examines the characteristics of Mandarin but also various other varieties of Chinese. No prior knowledge of a Chinese language is necessary.

Have you ever wondered why some languages have no word for the? What happens when a language has no tense? Why some languages have tone and others don’t? And what on earth does eh? mean, eh?

If so, this course is for you! In this course, we will consider linguistic phenomena that you might not find in your intro textbooks, but which are important typologically and commonly found across the world’s languages. And we will study them in-depth, in a scientifically informed way: building on your foundation in modern linguistics, you will be introduced to key concepts and theoretical tools that linguists use to analyze these phenomena. In short, the goal is to show you how your foundational theoretical toolbox can be extended to systematically understand a broader set of linguistic properties.

Topics will vary from year to year but may include: nouns and classifiers, verbs and event structure, tonogenesis, speech acts and speech act-level phenomena. Year to year, instructors may focus on phenomena common to a particular region of the world.

This course examines theoretical research on adult second language learning and the resultant implications for second language teaching. Topics include learning styles and strategies, age, affect, communicative competence, and sociolinguistics. Links are drawn to teaching practices, including error correction, materials selection, and order and method of presentation.

This course examines language acquisition by different populations: first language acquisition by normal, deaf and impaired children; first language re-acquisition by aphasic patients; second language acquisition by children and adults. The question that we will ask is the following: what are the similarities and differences across acquisition contexts? Comparative theoretical approaches will be examined in order to gain an insight into the following topics: evidence for innate linguistic endowment, the stages in the development of grammar, the role of input. An important component will be the analysis of both spontaneous corpora and experimental work.

This course provides an overview of second language vocabulary acquisition research and the resultant implications for second language teaching. Topics include dimensions of vocabulary knowledge, incidental and intentional vocabulary learning, textbook analysis, learning strategies, and teacher beliefs about vocabulary teaching and learning. Implications are drawn for pedagogical practices, including best vocabulary teaching practices, materials selection, and measuring vocabulary knowledge.

This course provides senior undergraduate students who have developed some knowledge of research methods used in the discipline of Linguistics to work in the research project of a U of T Mississauga professor for course credit. Enrolled students have the opportunity to become involved in original research, develop their research skills, and share in the excitement and discovery of acquiring new knowledge. Project descriptions for participating faculty members for the following summer and fall/winter sessions are posted on the ROP website in mid-February; students are invited to apply at that time. See Experiential and International Opportunities for more details.