Spring 2024 Courses
LING 4988: Senior Thesis Seminar. A year-long course which provides structure, accountability, and group feedback for Linguistics majors conducting independent thesis research.
LING 6301: Sociolinguistic Field Methods. This graduate course provides hands-on experience with a range of methods for collecting data in different areas of sociolinguistics.
Other Undergraduate Courses
LING 1000: Introduction to Language. Our department's entry-level course in linguistics for majors and others, surveying topics including phonetics, phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, discourse analysis, variation, and acquisition.
LING 2010: Sounds of Language. An introduction to phonetics and phonology, the linguistic subfields concerned with describing and explaining how speech sounds are made, used, heard, and mentally organized.
LING 2030: Language and Society. An introduction to sociolinguistics, in which we learn how language use by the individual and in the community can be studied using both quantitative and qualitative methods
Other Graduate Courses
LING 5320: Sociolinguistic Variation (link to pdf of Fall 2023 syllabus). Language varies: within speakers, across speakers, and over time. This course is a theoretical and practical introduction to variationist sociolinguistics, the subfield of linguistics concerned with understanding the relationship between variation and language change and with describing and accounting for variation in terms of the linguistic and social factors which underlie it. What are the objects of study in sociolinguistic research? What kinds of questions can we ask about the relationship between language and society, and how do we use quantitative methods to find their answers? We’ll address these foundational issues, read classic and contemporary papers in the field – about old fishermen, young Canadians, nerd girls, frat guys, Scottish toddlers, American politicians, and other remarkable language users – and apply what we’ve learned to group and individual projects exploring particular cases of variation.
Sociophonetics. Everyone has an accent. Moreover, everyone’s accent varies depending on who they are talking to, what they are talking about, what kind of personal identity they want to convey, and other contextual factors, and listeners accordingly attribute social meaning to the variation that they hear. In this course students learn how sociophonetic variation in production and perception can be systematically studied to answer questions about language, social meaning, and the link between them. The first part of the course focuses on the acoustic analysis of conversational speech. The second part turns to the experimental study of speech perception and social meaning and the implications of sociophonetic variation for phonological theory. Students develop skills throughout this course that will enable them to 1) make appropriate methodological choices when planning research projects in sociophonetics, 2) use tools such as ELAN, PRAAT, FAVE, NORM, and R to facilitate data processing, and 3) critically evaluate (socio)phonetic studies of language.
Advanced Methods in (Socio)Phonetics (seminar). Graduate students who plan to write masters or doctoral theses in sociophonetics or adjacent areas (phonetics, laboratory phonology) often need to master advanced methods of data preparation or analysis to address the research questions they want to address; the most innovative dissertations may even develop their own methods. The aim of this course is for students to begin this process by learning advanced methods that are useful in (socio)phonetics research. These could include methods for stimuli creation, platforms for running experiments, acoustic analysis beyond single-point measures, statistical analysis of multivariate data or for dimensionality reduction, plotting options for complex data, etc. Participants in the class will choose one or more topics to develop as a demo or tutorial to present to the class. On days that we don’t have tutorials or demos, we will read papers which articulate the research problems necessitating these techniques or demonstrating their use.
Language Variation and Place (seminar). What is the relationship between language and place? Place may of course define the scope of sociolinguistic study, delimiting an island (e.g Labov 1963), a neighborhood (Labov, 1966), a city (Trudgill, 1974), or some other area as the region in which speakers are found and data collected (Johnstone, 2004). However, places are also imbued with social meaning: physical location may be fixed, but a sense of place and orientation towards that place may not be (Johnstone, 2004; Eckert, 2004). Speakers in a particular place may come to associate specific linguistic variants with that place, and then use those variants to affirm their own identity as authentic residents both in naturalistic speech (Labov, 1963; Johnstone et al., 2002; Johnstone and Kiesling, 2008; Zhang, 2008; Becker, 2009; Grieser, 2015) and in dialect performances (Schilling-Estes, 1998). Moreover, a person’s sense of place is dynamic, with different aspects of place identity becoming salient as talk unfolds (Myers, 2006) and ‘local’ variants brought into use when local identity is particularly salient (Becker, 2009). However, speakers need not be from a place to use its variants for identity work (Eckert, 2004). In this seminar, we will examine the myriad ways in which language practices create meaningful connections with place, both in terms of regionally marked pronunciations and grammatical structures, as well as through word choice and framing in discussions of place. We will discuss the meaning of place (as opposed to space), the idea of rootedness and being "from somewhere", placelessness and being "from nowhere", enregisterment and commodification, ideologies of place, and migration, and how all of these phenomena influence language variation and change in both the individual and the community.
Sociophonetics & Phonology (seminar). The field of sociophonetics is concerned with ‘identifying, and ultimately explaining, the sources, loci, patterns, and communicative functions of socially structured variation in speech’ (Foulkes et al. 2010: 704). Sociophonetic research shows how nuances of pronunciation are used by speakers to convey social information and by listeners to draw conclusions about the social identity of their interlocutors. Researchers in this field also bring the empirical facts of variation to bear on questions of phonetic and phonological theory, using speech production and perception data to inform accounts of how sounds and words are learned, represented, processed, and linked to social information. The goal of this course is to address key issues in phonetics and phonology by critically reviewing relevant sociophonetic literature, identifying conflicts as well as common threads across this research, sketching the overall picture of the phonological and phonetic system that is implied by this work, and presenting avenues for future research that can fill in the gaps. Topics discussed include contrast & the phonemic inventory, phonotactics and alternations, the perception/production relationship, representations vs processes as the locus of variation, L1 acquisition, and language change.
Language Variation and Change Over the Lifespan (seminar) In this seminar, we focus on the acquisition and development of intraspeaker variation through the lifespan, from child acquisition of the linguistic and social constraints on variation to the adolescent peak of vernacular features (particularly within the context of high school, which Eckert 1997 has described as a 'hothouse' for the construction of identities via language and other semiotic resources), the post-adolescent retreat from the vernacular, the relatively unexplored stretch of 'middle age', and variation later in life. We consider how changes over the lifespan reflect the changing social milieu of the speaker and what those changes may tell us about the underlying linguistic system. We also explore the changes that occur when speakers come into sustained contact with new language varieties. Each student designs and pilots a study related to the course topic based on their own research interests, setting the stage for a more complete project that may serve as the basis for a QP or a dissertation proposal.
Style and Stylistic Variation (seminar) Sociolinguists of all kinds are interested in stylistic variation and language style – that is, variation within the speech of the individual, and individual ways of using language. Labovians focusing on language change analyze style-shifting to uncover community norms and the motivations for change, while ‘third wave’ scholars view stylistic variation as a means of shaping and presenting dynamic social identity. In this course, we critically examine a range of approaches to language style, chiefly from the perspective of variationist sociolinguistics, but also drawing on anthropological, ethnographic, interactional sociolinguistic, and corpus linguistic approaches.
Other Teaching
2015 LSA Summer Institute: Sociophonetics (with Lauren Hall-Lew)