Courses

This page lists all the courses in the Generative Linguistics program. Course numbers begin with a 2-digit prefix as follows:

• 10: courses offered in the School of Language Science
• 36: courses offered in the Generative Linguistics program

Click the "Back" button on your browser to return to the previous page.

Undergraduate Courses

We will introduce the basic concepts of modern general linguistics by getting to know the basic tools and methods which lie at the basis of linguistic analysis. The course is intended for all the students of the School of Language Sciences, and in particular to students in the Linguistics department and to students of the Hebrew, English and Romance studies departments. Our goal is to teach basic working methods at the different levels of linguistic analysis: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. The course is accompanied by a departmental Exercise the purpose of which is to allow students to internalize technical aspects of linguistic analysis.

Credit for this course is obtained upon fulfillment of the requirements of both the lecture and the Exercise. No previous knowledge in linguistics is presupposed.

The foundations of phonetics and phonology, with an emphasis on the sounds of Hebrew (past and present). The consonants will be studied from an articulatory perspective, and the vowels from a perceptual persepctive. The IPA chart and its use in phonetics and phonology. Comparison between the phonology of Modern Hebrew and older forms of the language. The mutual influences of sounds on each other; syllable structures in Modern Hebrew in relation to Biblical Hebrew.

The imparting of proficiency in phonetic transcription. Exercise for the purpose of making the ear sensitive to identifying the array of sounds in varieties of spoken and traditional Hebrew. Practical study of the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA, through the transcription of the pronunciation of Hebrew of speakers of different types.

The course consists of a series of weekly meetings. The course will be divided into modules consisting of a number of lectures with a common overarching theme. Each meeting features a lecture, usually by guest lecturers, for which the students prepare by reading assigned texts. In addition, each student participates in one-hour weekly discussion groups. There will be a final exam at the conclusion of the course.

Basic concepts in phonology: phonemes and underlying representation, phonological rules, distinctive features, autosegmental representation, and syllable structure. Examples will be drawn from a variety of languages.

This is an introduction to the study of meaning. The topics we will cover include: propositional calculus and predicate calculus; modality; entailment, presupposition and implicature; lexical aspect;vagueness and gradable predicates.

The course presents the Government and Binding Theory. Its aim is to give the students active control in the theoretic tools, including the Case module, the Binding module, the Thematic module and Movement.

Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational generative theory of syntax. It is based on parallel autonomous representations of surface syntactic structure and surface grammatical functions and an active lexical component. The course will discuss the conceptual content of LFG and its formalisms, and will examine how familiar syntactic constructions are analyzed.

Textbook: Falk, Lexical-Functional Grammar: An Introduction to Parallel Constraint-Based Syntax.

The course examines the primary concepts and issues in morphological theory and analysis: morphemes and allomorphy, inflection and derivation, morpheme-based vs. word-based approaches to morphology, paradigms, and the interaction between morphology and other components of the grammar.

Textbook: Martin Haspelmath, Understanding Morphology

How much of our syntactic knowledge is innate? Which aspects must be learned by exposure? The Principles and Parameters framework, which has developed out of Government and Binding, approaches language from a broad cross-linguistic perspective, in an attempt to answer these fundamental questions about syntactic knowledge. We cover major empirical domains, including Wh-movement, the distribution of null subjects, and verb placement phenomena.

We will present the students with the central methods of working in the field of semantics as it is known today in linguistics and in philosophy of language, as well as selected problems in the field. We will begin with Church's lambda calculus and see how it works in the compositional and gradual computation of the meaning of a sentence from the meanings of its parts. We will continue with familiar solutions to central questions in semantics, such as:

1. How can vagueness, as opposed to polysemy, be represented? How are vague adjectives interpreted?
2. How can the contribution of tense (past/present/future) to the meaning of the sentence be represented?
3. How are sentences with clausal complements (with verbs like believe, know, etc.) interpreted?
4. How do quantifiers work in natural language (aside from the existential and universal quantifiers known from classical logic)?
5. What are the syntactic constraints on possible scopes of quantifiers in the sentence?
6. How are generic sentences interpreted?
7. How is the meaning of a relative clause built?
8. How is the meaning of an interrogative setence built?
9. What are the different interpretations of pronouns? We will discuss deictic, anaphoric, reflexive, and bound meanings (the latter, also for pronouns which are not bound syntactically)
10. What is the semantic contribution of focused elements?

Questions concerning the linguistic codification of certain pragmatic factors will be examined and an attempt will be made to distinguish linguistic from extra-linguistic pragmatic parameters. The topics to be discussed include referentiality and its cognitive correlates and the syntax-pragamtics interface.

The course deals with theories of word meaning with an emphasis on verb meaning.

This course will survey the historical antecedents of modern generative grammar and the changes in linguistics introduced by generative grammar. These include a redefinition of the object of study and a reconceptualization of the notion 'language,' and radical changes in methodologoy. We will explore Chomsky's criticism of previous paradigms and the theoretical underpinnings of the new paradigm. The course will also address criticisms of the generative program.

A variety of discourse structure properties will be examined. The topics to be discussed include: syntactic, morphological, and lexical realizations of the organization of given information; aspects of cohesion and coherence; characterizations of textual sub-units in conversation; and principles underlying interpretation of underspecified material.

"Typology" is the study of the ways in which languages differ and the ways in which they are similar. In this course, we will compare syntactic constructions in a variety of languages. We will examine issues such as word order, the relation between structure and function, subjecthood, Case-marking patterns, and relative clauses. Time permitting, we will discuss markedness hierarchies and optimality theory.

Text: Comrie, Language Universals and Linguistic Typology (2^nd edition)

How do we manage to produce and comprehend language so fast and so accurately? The course will expose students to the major issues and methodologies used in psycholinguistic study. We will focus on the following topics: (1) Modularity and interactivity in language processing (2) The role of expectation in processing (3) How psycholinguistic data can be used in linguistic debates. We will concentrate on the processing of multi-word units (phrases longer than one word) as a way to test theories of language learning and representation. In addition to lecture, we will also learn about experimental software and design.

Language acquisition, processing and change are central issues in cognitive science and language research. Computational models in these areas are of two opposing types, echoing the debate between nativists and empiricists: symbolic rule-based and empiric corpus-based, the latter applying statistical learning and inference as a main vehicle. In this course we focus on cognitively-motivated machine-learning models for language processes. Human language acquisition is a particularly attractive area for study in this framework but not the only one. "Text understanding", in terms of topic classification and concept extraction, is also an area where learning from examples has proven very effective. Another example is language translation.

The course is organized in three major sections:

1. Fundamentals of machine learning theory; supervised and unsupervised learning; prediction functions; statistical alternatives.
2. Learnable models of grammar and their relevance to human language acquisition.
3. Applications of machine learning in other areas of language processing, including text classification and automatic translation.

Graduate Courses

We will examine the theoretical and linguistic foundations of the theories of de Saussure by reading his own manuscripts and his students' class notes in comparison with the published "Cours".

The purpose of the course is to create a forum of research students in the fields of languages and linguistics, with the purpose of creating familiarity between the students of the different departments, sharing of information about different methodologies in the study of language, interaction between students of different theoretical approaches, feedback in the form of ideas that arise through the research, open discussion of ideas which arise through joint reading of articles of general interest, help and support in the preparation of abstracts and lectures for scientific conferences.

At the beginning of the year, the students will present themselves and the topics of their work. Afterwards, we will read articles suggested by the teacher and students. Possible topics are: the expression of tense and aspect, the expression of modality, expressions of diathesis, causatives, ellipsis, periphrasis, text cohension, morphological description, dialectology, and more. The reading will be combined with the students presentation of their progress.

How does the social identity of the speakers influence language use? To what extent can language development and change be attributed to social characteristics of the speakers? How can the complex relations between language and social identity be analyzed? The course deals with these questions by surveying research on linguistic diversity, linguistic innovation, and multilingualness, in the context of social parameters like social status, origin, gender, and sexuality.

We will deal with Case and agreement features and the theoretical status of the Extended Projection Principle in various versions of the Minimalist Program and in an alternative model of morphology-syntax relations developed by Marantz and Bobaljik ("Case and licensing") through the interaction between quantifier scope, agreement features, and word order in various languages (English, Hebrew, Palestinian Arabic, Chinese, Japanese).

The course concerns a characterization of the notion 'Topic' at the sentence and at the discourse level, within a variety of theoretical frameworks.

We will examine typological issues relating to the grammatical function "subject" and develop a theory of subjecthood within a general theory of grammatical functions. Among the topics to be discussed: the subject as the expression of an argument, the relational hierarchy, subjects and anaphora, subjects in multi-clausal constructions, syntactic ergativity, and the universality of the subject

We will deal with the internal temporal structure of events which are expressed by verbs (lexical aspect), and with grammatical means of expressing events from various temporal aspects (grammatical aspect).

We will deal with various pieces of evidence of the importance of logical properties in determining the grammatical status of various linguistic expressions. The empirical basis of the discussion will include implicatures and quantifification over ordered objects (degree quantification). If possible, we will also deal with similar questions relating to the logical scope of various quantifiers and with expressions whose distribution is determined directly by the logical properties of their syntactic environment (polarity items).

A follow-up to material taught in courses on introductory logic, the study of language, theory of meaning, given in departments such as Linguistics, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and English Linguistics. The course examines Montague Grammar, which is a second-order calculus which expands predicate calculus in a way which is particularly appropriate for dealing with the semantics of natural language. The goal is to build the semantic representation of a sentence in natural language compositionally on the basis of the semantic representations of parts of the sentence as they are determined by the syntax of the natural language itself. Subjects such as quantification, indexicality, and intensionality will be emphasized.

A continuation of the course Logic and Formal Semantics (36808), in which articles on formal semantics dealing with various issues in the semantics of natural language will be read: various quantifiers and their syntactic and semantic behavior, modal structures, presuppositions, semantics of adjuncts, and vagueness.

The aim of this seminar is to increase the students' knowledge of theories of learning and language acquisition. The seminar will provide students with the theoretical background needed for teaching English as a second or foreign language. Among the topics to be discussed: the role of the first language in second language acquisition, Behaviorist learning theory, Contrastive analysis, Mentalist account of language acquisition, 'Interlanguage' theory, the 'natural' route development, the L1=L2 Hypothesis, the role of formal instruction in second language acquisition, learner strategies. Various formal models of second language acquisition will be examined critically.

In this course we will examine several phenomena in Russian linguistics. We will focus primarily on Russian syntax, but we will also discuss some morphological and semantic phenomena. We will discuss phenomena such as grammatical agreement, morphosyntax of case, genitive of negation, dative subjects, and various aspects of the verb system. The course is intended for students with a basic background in linguistics who are interested in Slavic languages.

Questions concerning the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of conditionals will be addressed. Some of the aspects to be examined include acquisition and cross-linguistic realizations.

"Grammatical functions" are notions like "subject" and "object". This course will examine the role of grammatical functions in syntactic description and their place in linguistic theory through the investigation of a wide range of constructions (passive, raising, control, wh constructions, predication, etc.).

In this course we will investigate the conceptual foundations of information structure and examine the syntactic, lexical and prosodic codifications of various sub-components.

This course will investigate various questions pertaining to the nature of logical form representations (LFs) and their construction in real time. We will begin by presenting various debates in the linguistic literature on the nature of LFs, focusing in particular on the syntactic position of quantificational expressions and the semantics mechanisms that allow for their interpretation. A primary focus will be on Antecedent Contained Deletion and related constructions which have been argued to motivate the abstract rule of Quantifier Raising (QR). We will then move to the discussion of evidence from sentence processing that bears on this debate in various ways. Finally, we will outline a research program that attempts to use the same logic for the investigation of additional construction types combining results from linguistics with the experimental methodology.

In wh-type constructions, a single element bears multiple grammatical functions. This multifunctionality is usually modeled formally as movement from the canonical position of one function to the canonical postion of the other function. In this course we will explore the properties of these constructions through a direct representation of multifunctionality, without movement. We will explore islands, pied-piping, the existence of empty categories, in-situ questions, externally- and internally-headed relative clauses, accessibility, parasitic gaps, and more.

The course introduces Dravidian languages spoken almost exclusively in South India--the four major and literary languages (Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam)--with focus on Malayalam. We will also discuss non-literary Dravidian languages, like Tulu, Toda and Gondi and Malto. Topics such as serial verb construction, tense and aspect, evolution of the morphology and grammatical categories in Malayalam will be discussed in relation to syntax theory, pragmatics and structural linguistics. Since the Dravidian languages are in contact with Indo-Aryan languages for at least two millennia, we will refer time and again to comparisons with other Indian languages such as Sanskrit, Pāli and Hindi. Similarly, the intellectual heritage of old grammatical traditions in South India will provide historical perspective of Dravidian linguistics.

The course addresses all students of linguistics or Indian Studies with no prior knowledge of a Dravidian language.

We will study the distribution of polarity sensitive items with special attention to the occurrence of such items in modal environments. The main goal of the course is to gain a better understanding of what polarity sensitivity teaches us about the syntax/semantic/pragmatics interface and about the relevance of logic to grammar.

Roughly speaking, semantics is the study of what words and sentences literally mean, and pragmatics is the study of how speakers use sentences to communicate contents that go beyond their literal contents. However, research in both fields over the last few decades reveals that this dichotomy is far from clear cut, and that the there is much intricate interaction between the two fields.

In this seminar, we will critically examine a range of contemporary foundational concepts and theories which posit non-trivial interactions between semantics and pragmatics. We will discuss in detail the sorts of interactions that each of these theories postulates, and consider the implications such theories have on the prospects of drawing a feasible distinction between semantics and pragmatics

1. The semantic conception of linguistic representation (Tarski)
2. The problem of representational indeterminacy (Quine, Putnam)
3. Searching for a solution: invariance & partiality of representation (TBA)
4. Representation in abstract discourse: cognitive & ontological problems (Benacerraf)
5. Searching for a solution: holistic & composite semantic representation (TBA)

Adjectives pose a number of interesting challenges to semantic theory. Different formal semantic theories, within linguistics and philosophy, exploit different mathematical structures to explain features of adjectival interpretations, such as vagueness, context dependency, and gradablity. We will discuss various types of empirical data, against the predictions of different theories. We will evaluate the pros and cons of different structures in explaining interpretation, distribution and acquisition of adjectives, and the way they differ and/or resemble expressions of other categories.

Two sources collaborate to give rise to the meaning of any utterance: 1) The specific combination of words which have been uttered (the domain of syntax and semantics) and 2) Additional reasoning processes, which rely on the application of general rules of conversation and communication and take into account context specific information such as encyclopedic knowledge, alleged intentions of the speaker, etc. (the domain of pragmatics). This course will provide an introduction to a number of phenomena at the interface between semantics and pragmatics: (scalar) implicatures, presuppositions, free choice inferences. One of the goals will be to lay out how traditional methods in formal linguistics (e.g., bare introspection) and experimental behavioral measures (e.g., language acquisition data or processing data) have been and should be used to establish a proper typology of the types of inference that exist in natural languages

It is often thought that wh constructions are evidence that syntactic theory must allow displacement (movement). In this course, we will examine the properties of these constructions in a theoretical framework without the device of movement.

The course covers major themes in the shift to the Minimalist Program in syntax--the elimination of intermediate levels of representation, the elimination of PRO, the copy theory of movement and its interaction with the interpretation of relative classes.

This course will deal with foundational issues of the lexicon within linguistic theory. We will look at such questions as: can linguistic meaning be isolated from general conceptual meaning? Can word meaning be decomposed? If so, what is the appropriate method of decomposition? What is the relation of the lexicon to other parts of the grammar: morphology and syntax, in particular.

The course examines sociolinguistic variation in English. We focus on linguistic variation conditioned by ethnicity, the case of African American Vernacular English, variation based on gender and sexuality, and their interfaces: What is the relationship between language and identity as it is often, though not necessarily, expressed in the the speech of white, black, women; black heterosexual men, etc.? Moving beyond the traditional quantitative approach to sociolinguistics ('Who says what how much?'), we address these questions from the perspective of the agency of speakers in choosing among linguistic variants to express complex social identities.

Courses cross-listed from other departments

What is cognitive science. The cognitive revolution: from behaviorism to cognitivism. The concepts of computation and representation. Intelligence and computers. Functionalism and related theories. Consciousness, innateness, classical theories and connectionist theories. The ontological status of the sub-conscious.

This seminar is intended for students who aspire to enrich their theoretical basis in pragmatic linguistics and to deepen their knowledge of French linguistics. It will be taught by a specialist in the field who will come from France to share her proficiency with the students at our university. The students need to understand French at least passively; the discussions can be conducted in English.

Imparting of the basic concepts and methods of proof in elementary logic; propositional calculus with metatheory, Aristotelian theory of syllogism, predicate calculus -- syntax and semantics: methods of proof, models

What is analytic philosophy? Analytic concepts with examples. In this introductory course, we will focus on the thought of Frege, Russel, Wittgenstein, logical positivism, Quine, Davidson, and Strawson. In addition, the place of philosophy of language and logic in the treatment of classical philosophical problems will be emphasized.

Part 1: Acquaintance with the processes of the development of Modern Hebrew and with the basics of the structure of the modern linguistic system. We will examine the consolidation of Modern Hebrew since the Haskalah and the influence of these processes on the linguistic characteristics of Modern Hebrew as a linguistic system distinct from earlier periods of the language.

Part 2: Consideration of the central issues in the fields of pronunciation, form, syntax, and meaning of contemporary Hebrew, both written and spoken registers. After the synchronic description, we will examine the degree of the relation between modern Hebrew and its historic roots. The linguistic analysis will be accompanied by the reading of contemporary research and discussion of their findings.

We will consider basic concepts related to language: the nature of language, the relation between language and the world, and language and thought. These issues will be discussed from various perspectives: linguistics, philosophy, literature, and the interface between them.

This course will address philosophical and linguistic theories concerning predication and existence and the connection between these notions. The course will also survey the historical the treatment of these phenomena within philosophy and linguistics and will look at points in which the two fields interact surrounding these issues.

Click the "Back" button on your browser to return to the previous page.