Roslyn Burns
Courses
Term: Fall 2020
LING 341 Phonology at the Interfaces: Contrast Dispersion
This course explores how languages of the world structure contrasts in sound systems through a property known as contrast dispersion. We analyze contrast dispersion from a variety of different perspectives (for example, phonetic, phonological, diachronic, etc.). Students explore different ways the contrast dispersion has been defined over time, alternative theoretical approaches to contrast dispersion, and how scholars have formally modeled phenomena involving contrast dispersion.
Prerequisite: LING 232
This course meets during the Reading Period: the week between the last week of classes and finals week.
This course can be applied towards the Social Sciences Yale College distributional requirement.
Term: Spring 2021
LING 220 General Phonetics
Investigation of possible ways to describe the speech sounds of human languages. Acoustics and physiology of speech; computer synthesis of speech; practical exercises in producing and transcribing sounds.
LING 232 Phonology I
Why do languages sound distinct from one another? Partly it is because different languages use different sets of sounds (in spoken languages) or signs (in signed languages) from one another. But it is also because those sounds and signs have different distributional patterns in each language. Phonology is the study of the systematic organization and patterning of sounds and signs. Students learn to describe the production of sounds and signs (articulatory phonetics), discuss restrictions on sound and sign distribution (morphemic alternation, phonotactics), and develop a model of the phonological grammar in terms of rules and representations. Throughout the course, we utilize datasets taken from a variety of the world’s languages.
This course can be applied towards the Social Sciences Yale College distributional requirement.