24.900 Class Home

24.900 Introduction to Linguistics

Fall 2007

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Instructor: David Pesetsky

TAs: Hyesun Cho, Gillian Elizabeth Scott Gallagher, Maria Giavazzi, Patrick Jackson Jones, Jonah I Katz

Lecture: TR9.30-11 (4-370)

Goals of the Class:

This class will provide some answers to basic questions about the nature of human language. Throughout the course, we will be learning (in many different ways) that human language is a fascinating, surprisingly intricate — yet law-governed! — mental system.

In the first 2/3 of the class, we will study some core aspects of this system in detail. In the last part of the class, we will use what we have learned to address a variety of other questions — including how dialects arise, how languages change over time, how language is processed by the brain and what we know (more accurately, what we don't know) about the evolution of language.

Announcements

Final Exam Time and Place

Thursday, December 20
1:30PM - 4:30PM

32-141 (NOT Johnson Track, as first announced)

Announced on 09 December 2007 3:51 p.m. by David Pesetsky

Final Exam Review Guide

Posted. (If you live on Stellar and downloaded this the minute it was posted, please download it again, since I made a few changes ten minutes later.)

Announced on 09 December 2007 3:47 p.m. by David Pesetsky

New lecture notes posted

For morphology (posted last week), phonology, acquisition, historical. There is a final syntax summary that I still want to post, and dialects will be added after Tuesday's class.

I do not intend to add much of a phonetics summary, except for some material about acoustic phonetics. By now, you should know where your alveolar ridge is located!

Note: My original posting of the historical linguistics slides had only the first two pages, due to a famous MS Word bug that I'd forgotten about. If you want the rest, please download it again.

UPDATE 12/16: Final syntax summary and the acoustic phonetics summaries are now posted.

Announced on 09 December 2007 3:17 p.m. by David Pesetsky

Final squib details

See homework page, or click here.

Announced on 25 November 2007 5:02 p.m. by David Pesetsky