Study of the phonology, morphology, syntax, and culture of a less-taught language. Possible offerings include Finnish, Hungarian, and other non-Indo-European languages. The topic for spring 2027 will be:

Korean Language and Culture: This course offers an introduction to the basic linguistic analyses of Korean. It starts with an overview of the typological features of the Korean language. After a brief survey overview, this course covers the writing systems including both the Korean Alphabet and the Romanization system. It also examines sound patterns, word structures, and grammatical structures of Korean. This course is designed to provide general linguistic characteristics of modern Korean to both undergraduate and graduate students. No knowledge of the Korean Language is required to take this course.

Reading and discussions of current developments and issues in linguistics. 

This course is not offered on a regular basis. The course offering for Spring 2027 is:

LING 4940/6940 AI 4900/6900

AI for Human Speech

Many of us now talk to AI systems every day: we speak, they listen, interpret what we say, and respond. But how can AI make sense of human speech? When and why does it fail?

This course introduces the foundations needed to answer those questions by examining both human speech as a signal and the computational systems used to process it. We will work with real speech datasets, explore different ways of representing speech, and learn how modern speech-AI systems turn those representations into predictions. By the end of the course, you will be able to navigate a speech-AI workflow, load and run existing models, perform inference, evaluate their outputs, and interpret where and why systems succeed or fail. Applications will include automatic speech recognition, health-related uses of speech, and other real-world speech technologies.

The synchronic and diachronic grammar of an older Indo-European language. Possible offerings include Avestan, Hittite, Lithuanian, or topics such as Indo-European phonology, morphology, or syntax.

For the Spring 2026 semester, this course will focus on Hittite:

Known to be Indo-European since 1915, the Hittite language of central Anatolia represents a later stage of a branch of the family that may have broken away from the original proto-speech community up to a thousand years earlier than any of its other branches. This class will study the grammar of Hittite in and will involve readings in Hittite texts in transliteration. At the end of the course students will be able to read transliterated Hittite texts.

The study of language as a cultural and social phenomenon. Topics include language and meaning, language and world view, language and social behavior, and language and social issues.

An interdisciplinary introduction to the study of situated language use, with an emphasis on natural, spontaneous dialogue. Students will interpret recordings and transcripts of naturally occurring conversation to identify key discourse events and linguistic features of interactional import. Focus will be placed on how linguistic resources are mobilized both to regulate the flow of information and to implement social actions, and how these practices vary across communities and cultures.

Traditional methods of historical linguistics are reviewed, with examples from several different language families. Various kinds of possible phonological and syntactic changes are investigated in relation to modern linguistic theory.

Continued studies in both the synchronic and diachronic grammar of classical Sanskrit.

The phonology, morphology, and syntax of the classical Sanskrit language, emphasizing the position of Sanskrit within the Indo-European language family and its importance for Indo-European linguistics.

Formal semantics for sentential and first-order predicate logic, including both soundness and completeness results for first-order logic. Additional topics may include Goedel's incompleteness results, the Skolem-Lowenheim theorem, or possible world semantics for modal logics.

Symbolic-mathematical logic, examining the propositional and predicate calculi, with emphasis on problems in translation and formalization and topics in the philosophy of logic and mathematics.