The primary goals of this text are to acquaint prospective teachers of English with certain aspects of the history, structure, and use of the English Language. Through considering the nature of the English language; how language and culture are interconnected as well as how it is acquired and how and why it changes, readers will come to a fuller understanding of sociolinguistics. This text discusses the nature of language, as well as how it is acquired; how and why languages change, and how the English language in particular has changed (and continues to change); why different varieties of English have developed, and why they continue to be used; how linguists have attempted to account for the (ir)regularities of English; how language and culture are related; and how linguistics can be used as a tool in the classroom. This text presents important topics for English teachers to know: the relationship between “standard” and “nonstandard” dialects, how and why language varies, how we can make informed decisions about what is “right” and “wrong” in language use, and generally how a sound knowledge of how language works can inform and benefit the pedagogical strategies needed to develop as a teacher. Ultimately, I want readers to think about language in ways not thought of before: objectively, passionately, critically, analytically, and logically. This allows readers to move beyond memorization of facts to original thought (which is sort of like the difference between knowing how to add and subtract, and being able to balance a checkbook).

In this course we will cover central aspects of modern formal logic, beginning with an explanation of what constitutes good reasoning. Topics will include validity and soundness of arguments, formal derivations, truth-functions, translations to and from a formal language, and truth-tables. We will thoroughly cover sentential calculus and predicate logic, including soundness and completeness results.

This course begins with an introduction to the theory of computability, then proceeds to a detailed study of its most illustrious result: Kurt GĚŚdel's theorem that, for any system of true arithmetical statements we might propose as an axiomatic basis for proving truths of arithmetic, there will be some arithmetical statements that we can recognize as true even though they don't follow from the system of axioms. In my opinion, which is widely shared, this is the most important single result in the entire history of logic, important not only on its own right but for the many applications of the technique by which it's proved. We'll discuss some of these applications, among them: Church's theorem that there is no algorithm for deciding when a formula is valid in the predicate calculus; Tarski's theorem that the set of true sentence of a language isn't definable within that language; and GĚŚdel's second incompleteness theorem, which says that no consistent system of axioms can prove its own consistency.

Relationship between computer representation of knowledge and the structure of natural language. Emphasizes development of the analytical skills necessary to judge the computational implications of grammatical formalisms, and uses concrete examples to illustrate particular computational issues. Efficient parsing algorithms for context-free grammars; augmented transition network grammars. Question answering systems. Extensive laboratory work on building natural language processing systems. 6.863 is a laboratory-oriented course on the theory and practice of building computer systems for human language processing, with an emphasis on the linguistic, cognitive, and engineering foundations for understanding their design.

Works of film examined in relation to thematic issues of philosophical importance that also occur in other arts, particularly literature and opera. Emphasis on film's ability to represent and express feeling as well as cognition.

This course is the third and final part of our graduate introduction to semantics. The other two classes are 24.970 Introduction to Semantics and 24.973 Advanced Semantics. The semester will be divided into somewhat independent units. One unit will be devoted to conversational implicatures (mainly scalar implicatures) and another to presupposition. In each unit, we will discuss basic concepts and technical tools and then devote some time to recent work which illustrates their application.

Survey of structural properties of natural languages, with special emphasis on the sound pattern. Representation of the lexicon. Physiology of speech production, articulatory phonetics. Acoustical theory of speech production; acoustical and articulatory descriptions of phonetic features and of prosodic aspects of speech. Perception of speech. Models of lexical access and of speech production and planning. Applications to recognition and generation of speech by machine, and to the study of speech disorders.

The goal of this course is to prepare you to engage in experimental investigations of questions related to linguistic theory, focusing on phonetics and phonology.

" This course is the first subject in the Environmental Policy and Planning sequence. It reviews philosophical debates including growth vs. deep ecology, "command-and-control" vs. market-oriented approaches to regulation, and the importance of expertise vs. indigenous knowledge. Its emphasis is placed on environmental planning techniques and strategies. Related topics include the management of sustainability, the politics of ecosystem management, environmental governance and the changing role of civil society, ecological economics, integrated assessment (combining environmental impact assessment (EIA) and risk assessment), joint fact finding in science-intensive policy disputes, environmental justice in poor communities of color, and environmental dispute resolution."

I realize that "Modes of Assertion" is a rather cryptic title for the course. What we will explore are ways of modulating the force of an assertion. This will engage us in formal semantics and pragmatics, the theory of speech acts and performative utterances, and quite a bit of empirical work on a not-too-well understood complex of data. It is obvious that he made a big mistake. If you're like me you didn't feel much of a difference. But now see what happens when you embed the two sentences: We have to fire him, because he obviously made a big mistake. We have to fire him, because it is obvious that he made a big mistake. One of the two examples is unremarkable, the other suggests that the reason he needs to be fired is not that he made a big mistake but the fact that it is obvious that he did. We will try to understand what is going on here and look at related constructions not just in English but also German (with its famous discourse particles like ja ) and Quechua and Tibetan (with their systems of evidentiality-marking, as recently studied in dissertations from Stanford and UCLA).

" This course focuses on financing tools and program models to support local economic development. It includes an overview of private capital markets and financing sources to understand capital market imperfections that constrain economic development; business accounting; financial statement analysis; federal economic development programs; and public finance tools. Program models covered include revolving loan funds, guarantee programs, venture capital funds, bank holding companies, community development loan funds and credit unions, micro enterprise funds, and the use of the Community Reinvestment Act to leverage bank financing."

This text is a practical guide for linguists, and programmers, who work with data in multilingual computational environments. We introduce the basic concepts needed to understand how writing systems and character encodings function, and how they work together at the intersection between the Unicode Standard and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Although these standards are often met with frustration by users, they nevertheless provide language researchers and programmers with a consistent computational architecture needed to process, publish and analyze lexical data from the world's languages. Thus we bring to light common, but not always transparent, pitfalls which researchers face when working with Unicode and IPA. Having identified and overcome these pitfalls involved in making writing systems and character encodings syntactically and semantically interoperable (to the extent that they can be), we created a suite of open-source Python and R tools to work with languages using orthography profiles that describe author- or document-specific orthographic conventions. In this cookbook we describe a formal specification of orthography profiles and provide recipes using open source tools to show how users can segment text, analyze it, identify errors, and to transform it into different written forms for comparative linguistics research.

WikiEdu course page for SLLC280: Mythology of the Oppressed (Fall 2022) with Professor Juan Uriagereka. Course taught at the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures in the College of Arts and Humanities, University of Maryland (UMD).

Course Description: Does information drive human history? Mythological recurrences say much about cultures that had to adapt their world views while attempting to preserve them. This course examines the cognitive or social bases of mythology, to be pursued from insights in cultural and literary studies, linguistics, the cognitive sciences, Neolithic-anthropology, archeology, etc. The course is designed to help students think about complex problems from a humanistic perspective, making liberal use of the sciences.