Spring 2026 Linguistics Courses LIVE + Advising Office Hours Tomorrow

Instructor: Maya Barzilai, TR 5:40 pm – 6:55 pm
Required for the major.
An introduction to the study of language from a scientific perspective. The course is divided into three units: language as a system (sounds, morphology, syntax, and semantics), language in context (in space, time, and community), and language of the individual (psycholinguistics, errors, aphasia, neurology of language, and acquisition). Workload: lecture, weekly homework, and final examination.

Instructor: William Foley, MW 2:40 pm – 3:55 pm.
No Prerequisite. Fulfills the Language Diversity or elective requirement.
Humans arrived in the Americas no earlier than thirty-thousand years ago and perhaps as recently as thirteen thousand years ago, yet since that time, Native Americans have developed an incredible richness and diversity of cultures and languages, with well over a thousand distinct indigenous languages. In this course, we will focus on the indigenous languages of the U.S. and Canada. At the time of European contact in the sixteenth century, there were around 400 languages spoken across the territories of these two countries, yet today only around half of these are still spoken, and of these about 150 are only spoken by elders and in grave danger of not being passed onto younger generations. It is estimated that only between 20 or so indigenous languages in the U.S. and Canada have good prospects of being spoken natively into the twenty-second century. In this course, we will survey the variety and diversity of indigenous languages and the cultural values tied to them in the pre-contact era, and then look into the causes of their current decline in use and what steps are being taken to reverse this and revitalize them, even languages that no longer have any first-language speakers. We will investigate the amazing diversity in the basic structures of these languages and the meanings they can express, highlighting the difference between them and the more familiar patterns of English. We will study how they are used in indigenous contexts, both traditional and modern, to communicate valued sociocultural and aesthetic ends. Finally, we will explore three indigenous languages in greater depth, two from New York, and appreciate some of the native oral traditions in the original languages. This course will be of interest to any undergraduate student curious about the prehistory and subsequent Native history and ethnography of North America.

Instructor: Nikita Bezrukov, MW 1:10 pm – 2:25 pm
Prerequisite: Introduction to Linguistics or instructor permission. Fulfills the elective requirement.
Why is Turkish spelling easy while English looks chaotic? Why do Japanese, Hebrew, and Armenian carve language up so differently on the page? And why are game developers and conlang fans obsessed with scripts? This course is a hands-on tour of how writing systems work. We treat orthography as grammar: principled mappings from sounds and morphemes to visible forms. You will learn the core toolkit (units of writing, allography, script typology, depth and transparency), test it on real languages, and run design-studio labs that evaluate or improve actual orthographies. Labs welcome creative builds: prototype an in-game script or a conlang orthography, justify its rules, and test its usability. Light formal modeling keeps things precise without heavy math. By the end, you will be able to analyze a script, argue for design choices, and ship a small reform or a polished worldbuilding system. Although writing systems have traditionally been sidelined in theoretical linguistics, learning how scripts encode phonology and morphology sharpens core theory and supports real applications, including teaching children to read and write, designing accessible orthographies, and building effective NLP architectures. Open to undergraduates of all levels.

Instructor: Meredith Landman, MW 11:40 am – 12:55 pm
Prerequisite: Introduction to Linguistics. Fulfills the Language & Meaning theme or elective requirement.
This course provides an introduction to the study of meaning in language. We will explore how language encodes meaning (semantics) and how speakers use language to convey meaning (pragmatics). The course has both a theoretical and a descriptive component: Students will learn the technical tools of semantic and pragmatic theories and at the same time become familiar with the types of empirical phenomena these theories are designed to account for and explain. Throughout the semester, we will see how formal tools from logic and mathematics are employed to study linguistic meaning.

Instructor: John McWhorter, TR 11:40 am – 12:55 pm
No Prerequisite. Fulfills the Language in Context theme or elective requirement.
How language structure and usage varies according to societal factors such as social history and socioeconomic factors, illustrated with study modules on language contact, language standardization and literacy, quantitative sociolinguistic theory, language allegiance, language and power.

Instructor: Meredith Landman, MW 4:10 pm – 5:25 pm
Required for the major. Prerequisite: Introduction to Linguistics.
This course is an introduction to syntax, the study of sentence structure in the world’s languages. We
will explore syntactic phenomena from a variety of languages, and students will learn the tools and
techniques of syntactic analysis as well as key concepts, questions, and debates of formal syntactic
theory. Topics will include: phrase structure and constituency; the role of the lexicon and word
meaning; types of clauses; the influence of pragmatics on word order; and syntactic typology and
cross-linguistic commonalities and variation.

Instructors: Meredith Landman, John McWhorter
Required for the major. 
Linguistics majors in their senior year should enroll in 3 points.

Instructor: Nikita Bezrukov, M 6:10 pm – 8:00 pm
Prerequisite: Intro to Linguistics and one of the following three categories: Introduction to Cognitive Science, Introduction to Psychology, or two advanced linguistics courses. Fulfills the Psychology and Biology of language theme or elective requirement.
In little more than fifty years linguistics has shifted from philological description to a cognitive-biological quest to uncover the mind’s language faculty. This seminar traces that shift through the generative tradition, which treats language as an innate “mental organ” whose universal grammar lets children build a full syntax from sparse input. We follow Minimalism’s bold reduction: a single operation called Merge, plus a finite lexicon and two interfaces, one to articulation and one to thought, yields the “digital infinity” of human expression. Framing this architecture in evolutionary terms, we confront Darwin’s problem: did language emerge gradually for communication or erupt suddenly from pre-existing cognitive parts? Evidence from birdsong, primate calls, and gesture helps separate general performance limits from the species-specific competence that remains uniquely human. Students will practice minimalist analyses and weigh competing biolinguistic accounts, using language as a window onto the design and origin of the human mind.

Instructor: Reyes Llopis-Garcia, TR 2:40 pm – 3:55 pm
Open to Undergraduate and Graduate Students. Taught in English. No prerequisite. Fulfills the Language & Meaning or elective requirement. 
What happens in the mind when language is at work? How do we process our surroundings, understand the world we live in, accommodate our own culture as shaper of perceptions… and communicate about it all by using the right words? Cognitive Linguistics provides a theoretical framework to understand that language stems from interaction with the world and emerges in the mind as part of our experience as natural beings in the physical world. Meaning is construed as a bridge between all the complex thoughts in our minds and what we can all understand in relatable and shared experience: our physical position in space. Language embodies the global cognitive capabilities of all human beings. In this course, we will explore key concepts in Cognitive Linguistics such as conceptual metaphor and metonomy, mental spaces, prototypes, embodied cognition and gesture, linguistic typology, linguistic prototypes, cognitive grammar, and language learning.