teaching

key topics for the courses I teach.

LING101

Introduction to Linguistics

  • Language and Communication – Definition of language, features of human communication, and comparison with animal communication.
  • Phonetics and Phonology – Speech sounds, articulatory phonetics, phonemes, minimal pairs, and phonological rules.
  • Morphology – Word structure, morphemes, derivation vs. inflection, and word formation processes.
  • Syntax – Sentence structure, phrase types, and basic syntactic rules.
  • Semantics and Pragmatics – Meaning in language, lexical semantics, context and implicature.
  • Sociolinguistics – Language variation, dialects, registers, and social factors in language use.
  • Historical Linguistics – Language change, comparative methods, and language families.
  • Psycholinguistics – Language acquisition, comprehension, and cognitive processing of language.
  • Typology and Universals – Linguistic diversity, word order typologies, and cross-linguistic generalizations.


LING201

Introduction to Syntax

  • Basic Syntactic Concepts – Sentence, phrase, and clause distinctions.
  • Constituency Tests – Substitution, movement, coordination, and deletion as tools for determining structure.
  • Phrase Structure Rules – Building tree diagrams, understanding NP, VP, PP, etc.
  • X-bar Theory – Introduction to the X-bar schema, complements vs. adjuncts.
  • Syntactic Categories and Functions – Identifying subjects, objects, predicates, etc.
  • Word Order – Basic word order patterns (SVO, SOV, etc.) and their implications.
  • Movement – Basics of transformational rules, wh-movement, and head movement.
  • Agreement and Case – Subject-verb agreement, nominative and accusative case assignment.
  • Cross-Linguistic Variation – Language-specific syntactic structures, and comparison across languages.


LING301

Foundations of Syntactic Theory

  • Generative Grammar – Core principles of Chomsky’s framework and its motivations.
  • Universal Grammar (UG) – The notion of an innate grammatical framework.
  • Deep Structure vs. Surface Structure – Understanding transformations in syntax.
  • Binding Theory – Principles A, B, and C; anaphors, pronouns, and referential expressions.
  • Theta Theory – Thematic roles (agent, patient, theme, etc.) and argument structures.
  • Government and Binding – Historical concepts of government, c-command, and locality.
  • Minimalist Program – Economy of derivation and representation, and core notions like Merge.
  • Syntactic Parameters – Head directionality, null subjects, and other parameterized differences.
  • Formalism and Tree Structures – Detailed analyses of syntax diagrams using modern theory.


LING401

Theories of Grammar

  • Traditional Grammar – Prescriptive rules and grammar traditions.
  • Structural Grammar – Bloomfieldian linguistics, and the focus on forms and patterns.
  • Transformational-Generative Grammar (TGG) – Overview of Chomskyan theories and their evolution.
  • Functional Grammar – Role of semantics and pragmatics in syntactic structures.
  • Dependency Grammar – Relationships between words, focusing on syntactic dependencies.
  • Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) – Interactions between lexical entries and syntactic structures.
  • Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) – Feature structures, unification-based approaches.
  • Construction Grammar – Grammar as a collection of form-meaning pairings (constructions).
  • Comparative Overview of Theories – Strengths and weaknesses of different models.

LING501

NLP for Linguistics

  • Text Categorization - Topic modeling (e.g., LDA, NMF), Feature selection (TF-IDF, chi-square), Classification algorithms, Evaluation metrics (precision, recall, F1-score)
  • Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis - Part-of-speech tagging, Dependency parsing, Named entity recognition (NER), Word sense disambiguation, Semantic role labeling
  • Corpus-based Statistical Approaches - N-gram models and frequency distributions, Collocation extraction, Zipf’s law and lexical diversity, Statistical parsing, Word embeddings from corpora (e.g., Word2Vec, GloVe)
  • NLP- Supervised and Unsupervised Learning Methods
  • Simple Context-free Grammars - Parse trees and derivations, Chomsky normal form, Recursive descent parsing, LL and LR parsing techniques, Ambiguity in grammars, Syntax-directed translation