Moodle

The primary purpose of this seminar is to demonstrate an advanced research program in linguistics, and it uses the topic of partitivity as the example. The course will begin with the basics of partitives and why we distinguish a cup of the tea from a cup of tea in grammatical analyses. In short, partitivity is a fundamental notion in semantics where we discuss a specific entity—e.g. some tea—and a subset of the entity—a cup of the tea. Related topics like quantification, measurement, definiteness, pronouns, noun phrase structure, etc. will also be addressed. In particular, we will look at the realization of nominal partitivity across dialects of English, German and Dutch. The course will review examples of research and grammatical analyses in the subject area and we will pay particular attention to the extent to which each piece of research connects to the others and to general questions in linguistics. Each student will be expected to deliver a 30-45 minute presentation in class based on a reading assignment.

The primary purpose of this seminar is to demonstrate an advanced research program in linguistics, and it uses the topic of partitivity as the example. The course will begin with the basics of partitives and why we distinguish a cup of the tea from a cup of tea in grammatical analyses. In short, partitivity is a fundamental notion in semantics where we discuss a specific entity—e.g. some tea—and a subset of the entity—a cup of the tea. Related topics like quantification, measurement, definiteness, pronouns, noun phrase structure, etc. will also be addressed. In particular, we will look at the realization of nominal partitivity across dialects of English, German and Dutch. The course will review examples of research and grammatical analyses in the subject area and we will pay particular attention to the extent to which each piece of research connects to the others and to general questions in linguistics. Each student will be expected to deliver a 30-45 minute presentation in class based on a reading assignment.

As a fundamental question in linguistics is "How do languages of the world differ?", questions that follows from that is "How do we demarcate one language from another?" and "How do we account for language variation?" While some chalk variation up to mistakes, others look at the way that variations of a language are systematic, and sometimes name these variations accents, dialects, or varieties. In this class, we will explore potential answers to these questions, focusing specifically on English. We will look at the external history of English--i.e. the events that lead to English becoming spread across the globe and the factors that lead to the development of different Englishes. We will look at the grammar of different Englishes to examine how they vary systematically with respect to phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. We will also discuss external consequences of the spread of English, such as its influence on some languages, and the loss of other languages entirely.