Natalie Weber
Courses
Ling 235/635 - Phonology II
Topics in the architecture of a theory of sound structure. Motivations for replacing a system of ordered rules with a system of ranked constraints. Optimality theory: universals, violability, constraint types and their interactions. Interaction of phonology and morphology, as well as the relationship of phonological theory to language acquisition and learnability. Opacity, lexical phonology, and serial versions of optimality theory.
Prerequisite: LING 232 or permission of instructor.
This course can be applied towards the Social Sciences Yale College distributional requirement.
Ling 343/743 - Topics in Phonology: Models of Phonological Variation
Exploration of variable phonological phenomena and how they are best modeled, both within and across lexical items. Topics include gradient phonotactic knowledge and the nature of phonological grammar as well as the larger cognitive system in which it is situated.
LING 235 (Phonological Theory) or permission of instructor.
Ling 232/632 - 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.
Ling 241/641 - Field Methods
Principles of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics applied to the collection and interpretation of novel linguistic data. Data are collected and analyzed by the class as a group, working directly with a speaker of a relatively undocumented language. Discussion of ethics, linguistic diversity, and endangerment,
Open to majors and graduate students in Linguistics, and to others with permission of instructor. Students should have taken LING 232 or LING 220 and one other linguistics class.