Course Information

Welcome to the webpage of the linking theory course for the summer semester of 2023!

Grades

The grades for this module are based on a series of smallish projects (Portfolio), assigned and completed throughout the course of the semester.

Course description

We will focus in this module on how to put static linguistic analyses to work. In linguistics, as in the broader cognitive sciences, it is natural to break up the problem of explaining human behaviour (which is the only empirical data we have) into the more abstract problems of identifying and describing regularities in behaviour (which we can represent as rules), and of explaining how these rules can be used to produce the behaviour in question.

In linguistics, we are primarily interested in our abilities to speak and to understand language. We abstract out the regularities in these abilities into what we call a grammar, but then we are left with the task of explaining how this grammar could be used to produce these abilities.

This seminar is devoted to understanding how to establish a formal link between our grammar and empirical data.