Spring 2025

LING 460 Making Sense of Big Data: Textual Analysis with R

Undergraduate

This course covers methods for working with textual data (corpora, databases, etc.) that include data cleaning techniques, graphing, statistical analysis, web-scraping, and categorization models in R. Students will complete their own data project by the end of the course.

LING 573 Linguistic Field Methods I

Mixed Undergraduate/Graduate
Language of study for Spring 2025: Chatino (Otomanguean; Mexico)

This course is designed to give students experience working in a “fieldwork” setting with a native speaker of an understudied language. We will be working closely with a native speaker consultant to document and analyze various aspects of their grammar. Students present a final project at the end of the semester, which can feature a research paper or a community-centered creative project.

Other courses

LING 101 Introduction to Language

Undergraduate

This course is an introduction to the field of linguistics. Students study the formal analysis of human language, which includes the studies of sounds (phonetics and phonology), words (morphology), sentences (syntax), meaning (semantics and pragmatics), language acquisition, language use in society (sociolinguistics), and language change over time (historical linguistics). We also touch upon topics involving animal communication, computational linguistics, language documentation/revitalization, and anthropological linguistics. Throughout the semester, students have several opportunities to explore how linguistics is used across disciplines and the careers possible within linguistics.

LING 200 Phonology

Undergraduate

This course introduces students to phonological phenomena and data from many languages, including English. Throughout the semester, students frequently examine data sets to gainhands-on experience with phonological analysis. Students are also introduced to several phonological theories and asked to think critically about how these theories apply to phonological data, why speakers produce the sound patterns that they produce, and account for the similarities and the differences in sound patterns across the languages of the world.

LING 401 Introduction to Computational Linguistics

Mixed Undergraduate/Graduate

Natural language processing and computational linguistics are rapidly growing fields of investigation. In this course, students learn the basics of programming in Python to solve linguistic problems. No prior programming knowledge is required or assumed. Students look at how natural language is processed from a computational standpoint, as well as some larger theories behind natural language processing. All students participate in a final presentation of a topic of their choosing (with consultation from the instructor) that applies the Python programming basics we learn throughout the semester to a linguistic problem or data set.