Jason Shaw
Courses
Ling 110 - Language: Introduction to Linguistics
This is a course about language as a window into the human mind and language as glue in human society. Nature, nurture, or both? Linguistics is a science that addresses this puzzle for human language. Language is one of the most complex of human behaviors, but it comes to us without effort. Language is common to all societies and is typically acquired without explicit instruction. Human languages vary within highly specific parameters. The conventions of speech communities exhibit variation and change over time within the confines of universal grammar, part of our biological endowment. The properties of universal grammar are discovered through the careful study of the structures of individual languages and comparison across languages. This course introduces analytical methods that are used to understand this fundamental aspect of human knowledge. In this introductory course students learn about the principles that underly all human languages, and what makes language special. We study language sounds, how words are formed, how humans compute meaning, as well as language in society, language change, and linguistic diversity.
This course can be applied towards the Social Sciences Yale College distributional requirement.
Ling 220/620 - Phonetics I
Each spoken language composes words using a relatively small number of speech sounds, a subset of the much larger set of possible human speech sounds. This course introduces tools to describe the complete set of speech sounds found in the world’s spoken languages. It covers the articulatory organs involved in speech production and the acoustic structure of the resulting sounds. Students learn how to transcribe sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet, including different varieties of English and languages around the world. The course also introduces sociophonetics, how variation in sound patterns can convey social meaning within a community, speech perception, and sound change.
This course can be applied towards the Social Sciences Yale College distributional requirement.
Ling 239 - Phonetics II: Speech Production and Perception
This course introduces theoretical tools for explaining physical aspects of speech, including speech articulation, acoustics, audition, and perception. Acoustic properties of speech sounds are derived from first principles, following acoustic theories of speech production. The course covers articulatory kinematics alongside contemporary theories of motor coordination and speech planning. Audition and speech perception are introduced in the context of signal processing and statistical tools for mapping the continuous phonetic signal to phonological representations. These topics are pursued in the context of speech examples from a wide range of natural languages, preparing students to engage with primary literature in the field of phonetics.
Prerequisites: LING 110, 116, 217, or 220.
Ling 328/728 - Laboratory Phonology
Experimentation has emerged as an important methodology for studying phonological knowledge, the mental representation of sound patterns in language. This seminar style course discusses current approaches to analyzing sound patterns of diverse languages using experimental data. We read seminal and recent papers developing methods for relating phonological form, including syllable structure, phonotactics, alternations, stress, and intonation, to its expression in articulatory and acoustic phonetics. Prerequisite: LING 235 or LING 220, or LING 238. This course can be applied towards the Social Sciences Yale College distributional requirement.