Linguistics

The study of the relationship between language and society with the goal of understanding social structure through language; major themes are multilingual societies, including pidgin and creoles, and social interaction through speech. (Given by the Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics). While this course fulfills a requirement for the minor program in English Language Linguistics, it does not count towards the major or minor programs in Linguistic Studies.

Ways in which women and men differ in their use of language and in their behaviour in conversational interaction: ways in which language reflects cultural beliefs about women and men.

This course examines simultaneous and successive second (and multiple) language acquisition. We will look at topics such as the bilingual brain, the nature of the input, age constraints on language acquisition, language separation and cross-linguistic influences, the status of the heritage language, schooling in a second language (for example French immersion programs), and various methods used in the study of bilingualism in individuals. Bilingual/multilingual corpora will be examined. The language of instruction will be English. Students will have the option to write assignments in either English or French. Written work to be completed in French for credit towards a Specialist (French) or Major (French).

This course provides an introduction to the principles and frameworks of second language assessment as well as to the practices of standardized testing and classroom assessment. We begin by discussing models of linguistic competence and frameworks for second language assessment as well as test design including language benchmarking. In the second part of the course, the focus turns to best practices in the assessment of vocabulary, grammar, comprehension, production, and socio-pragmatic competence.

(Offered in English) This course offers students the opportunity to become familiar with the primary research methods used in sociolinguistic studies, with how sociolinguistics helps to understand the properties of Canadian French, and with the pedagogical implications arising from sociolinguistic research on Canadian French. This course will contain a research-based component. Written work to be completed in French for credit towards a Specialist (French) or Major (French).

Lectures on fundamental principles of phonetics, phonology, and morpho-phonology with illustrations from English and a broad spectrum of other languages. Practice in elementary analytic techniques and applications from acquisition, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. REQUIRED COURSE FOR ANY PROGRAM IN LINGUISTICS.

Lectures on fundamental principles of morpho-syntax, syntax, and semantics with illustrations from English and a broad spectrum of other languages. Practice in elementary analytic techniques and applications from acquisition, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. REQUIRED COURSE FOR ANY PROGRAM IN LINGUISTICS.

A general-interest course on language. The structure of language; the social and psychological aspects of language; how language changes over time, with special reference to the history of English. Also origin of language, writing systems, and language acquisition.

Note: This course will not count towards any Linguistics program of study. It will only count as an elective.

Students will learn about fundamental grammatical concepts, focusing on the major grammatical categories in English and how they interact at the phrase level. They will be introduced to the main constituents of English sentences and learn about the basic relationship between tense, aspect, and modality. Students will learn to apply this knowledge as a tool to think analytically about English, evaluating various registers and styles, and gaining an awareness of their own style of speaking and writing. Depending on the instructor, this course may be delivered fully or partially online. Students are required to take the final exam at the UTM campus. Arrangements will be made for proctored exam writing for students who are registered at Ontario university locations outside of the GTA. This course does not count towards the Linguistic Studies minor or major program.

This course examines complex methods of sentence construction that will enable a critical analysis of English sentence structure, word and sentence meanings, and language function in communicative contexts. This course is particularly suitable for students who wish to improve their academic writing skills or who wish to teach English. This course does not count towards the Linguistic Studies minor or major program.

This course introduces the sounds and sound patterns of English from a linguistic perspective. Topics will include the articulation of speech sounds and their phonetic transcription, as well as analysis of the rules governing how these sounds are structured in natural language. This course does not count towards the Linguistic Studies minor or major programs.

Investigation of the sounds most commonly used in languages from an articulatory and acoustic point of view, with practice in transcription and analysis.

This course explores the nature and organization of phonological systems (ie. the sound structure of languages) with practical work in analysis.

This course explores the nature and organization of morphological systems (word formation rules, organization of paradigms, etc.) with practical work in analysis.

This course is an introduction to generative syntax focusing on the Government and Binding framework. Problem sets will be used for practicing argumentation and analytical skills.

An analysis of English words, the history of their development and the variation in their use across the English-speaking world. Topics include the history and structure of words, the relation between sound and spelling, dialect variation and the development of dictionaries. This course does not count towards the Linguistic Studies minor or major program. Formerly LIN203H5.

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.

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 is a general introduction to psycholinguistics and language acquisition. It covers topics such as the neurobiological basis of language, the mental lexicon, memory, speech production/perception, sentence comprehension, and first/second language acquisition and bilingualism. The course includes a tutorial introducing students to the methods and tools used for quantitative research in psycholinguistics and language acquisition.

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. Formerly LIN368H5.

The aim of the course is to provide an in-depth description of the phonetic and phonological system of English.Depending on the instructor, special topics discussed in the course may include prosody, dialect differences, acquisition, among others. This course does not count towards the Linguistic Studies minor or major programs.

For human listeners, understanding speech seems automatic and effortless, even when confronted with diverse talkers and many different communicative contexts. However, the underlying processes by which we perform this task are not well understood. This course covers the fundamentals of speech perception, discussing how it is shaped by a combination of linguistic, auditory, and cognitive influences. Through laboratory exercises, students will replicate classic experimental findings and gain hands-on experience with data analysis.

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 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 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.

This course explores the linguistic properties characteristic of the Romance language family. We examine the major languages as well as understudied varieties by comparing their phonological, morphological and syntactic properties. A historical perspective allows us to consider how many of the common features of this family evolved from spoken Latin, while their distinctive properties have arisen through both internal and external forces. No prior knowledge of Latin or a Romance language is necessary. For students in either a French Specialist or Major Program and/ or an Italian Specialist or Major Program, written work must be completed in the language of study.

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 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.

This course examines several topics which have created controversy in linguistics, topics about which various scholars have expressed opposing views through published articles. By reading and discussing these debates, students will learn how to critically analyze linguistics articles. The aim of this course is for students to develop skills in identifying the authors' assumptions, assessing their argumentation and recognizing how linguists build arguments for opposing views on a certain issue. The topics may range from big picture questions like the validity of Universal Grammar to more specific questions about a linguistic phenomenon. By the end of the course, students will have developed more acute reading skills, thereby also improving their ability to write academically, and more particularly in linguistics. The title of the course might sound scary, but the course itself is not at all! Formerly LIN481H5.

Introduction to the main methods, tools and techniques used in the analysis, interpretation and presentation of linguistic data. Topics may include research in the areas of general linguistics, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and dialectology. This course involves a practical component where students will apply skills learned in order to carry out their own study. Note that a background in statistics is NOT required for this course. Formerly LIN468H5

This course provides experience in language analysis based on elicited data from a native speaker of an understudied language. It emphasizes procedures and techniques and provides an opportunity for first-hand appreciation of linguistic unity and diversity.

Much of linguistic theory assumes the existence of an “ideal speaker/hearer” of a given language. However, in the real world, particularly in linguistically diverse communities such as the GTA, there is an enormous amount of variability driven by differences in language background, regional affiliation, and social factors. This course examines the many factors contributing to accentedness, and how listeners adapt their perception when confronted with different accents. It also explores how models of language development, processing, and production account for accent-related variability.

How can we get a computer system to carry out meaningful tasks, such as determining if a restaurant review is positive ? How can computational experiments help linguists understand meaning and its use better ? This course will introduce students to computational linguistic concepts and techniques pertaining to meaning, such as vector space semantics and sentiment analysis. The course combines a theoretical perspective on meaning and computation with hands-on lab work.

A brief introduction to Linguistics and Computing followed by applications to computational understanding of text and language. This course is cross-disciplinary, tools and project based; it teams Linguistics and Computer Science students in projects exploring novel applications of Natural Language Processing. Example topics include text summarization, classification and sentiment analysis using tools such as Python and the NLTK with applications to understanding the web and social media. Topics and applications will vary by instructor.

This course considers the impact on variant use by second language learners exerted by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, such as the surrounding linguistic context, age, sex, style, and curricular and extra-curricular exposure. Implications are drawn for second language teaching, including deciding what registers and variants to teach and what activities to employ.

All languages, in all linguistic domains, exhibit variation - more than one way of saying the same thing. This variation is not random but dependent on various linguistic, social, and cognitive conditioning factors. This course explores the theory and practice of analyzing such sociolinguistic variation. Students will receive hands-on instruction in fieldwork methods for collecting natural speech data and quantitative methods for analyzing patterns in that data.

This course examines current issues of theoretical and/or empirical relevance in linguistics with special reference to phenomena involving language change. Depending on the instructor, the focus of the course may be more oriented towards phonology, morpho-syntax, semantics, or the lexicon. The contact hours for this course may vary in terms of contact type (L, S, T, P) from year to year, but will be between 24-36 contact hours in total. See the UTM Timetable.

An advanced seminar on current issues of theoretical relevance in linguistics with special reference to Creole languages, in particular their emergence and their linguistic properties compared to those of the contributing languages. Depending on the instructor, the course may emphasize on French-based, English-based or Portuguese-based Creoles.

An advanced seminar on current issues of theoretical relevance in Linguistics with special reference to Romance languages such as French, Italian, Spanish and Romanian. Depending on the instructor, focus of the course may be more oriented towards morpho-phonology or morpho-syntax.

This course examines cross-linguistics typological features found in the languages of the world. Special attention is given to describing phonological, morphological or syntactic patterns found cross-linguistically. The goal of the course is to draw on the range of variation in order to uncover language universals.

An introduction to the structure of a featured language other than English. Topics of analysis may include the phonological, morphological, syntactic, or semantic systems; the writing system; historical aspects; variation. Students will use the tools of linguistic analysis learned in prior courses to examine the structural properties of this language. No prior knowledge of the language is necessary.

This course examines cross-cultural language use by second language learners from both a theoretical and pedagogical perspective. Topics addressed include the role of pragmatic transfer between native and target languages, individual differences, learning context, and instruction in the development of second language pragmatic competence.

This course offers a comprehensive survey and analysis of fundamental concepts and issues related to second, bilingual, and foreign language instruction by developing students' knowledge of second language acquisition, approaches to language teaching, computer-assisted teaching, and pedagogical design and implementation in the language classroom.

A research or reading project undertaken by the student under the supervision of a staff member. Open only when a faculty member is willing and available to supervise.

A research or reading project undertaken by the student under the supervision of a staff member.

A research or reading project undertaken by the student under the supervision of a staff member.