MA course descriptions

Phonology Ia and Phonology IIa: Advanced Phonological Theory A and B

Intermediate to advanced level. Current phonological theories: rules vs. parameters vs. constraints. Theories of distinctive features and feature structure. Prosodic phonology and morphology. Interface issues: phonetics and phonology, morphology and phonology, syntax and phonology.

Phonology Ib and Phonology IIb: Current Issues in Phonology A and B

Issues-based programmes centred around the primary literature. Topics include: output-oriented treatments of syllable structure, tone, vowel harmony, consonantal lenition and fortition; phonetically-driven constraints; auditory-acoustic vs. articulatory features.

Introduction to Speech and Hearing

The speech chain, speech articulation, physical acoustics, acoustics of speech production, signal analysis for sound, auditory coding of sound, speech perception and linguistic decoding.

Phonology IIc: Phonology Research Seminar

The content of this course will vary from year to year, but will be based on a number of seminal papers in phonological theory focussing on a small number of topical issues in current phonological research.

Syntax Ia: Foundational Issues in Syntax

This course explores core properties of natural language syntax in the context of several theories of syntax. The Language Faculty, Constituency & Displacement, Argument Structure, Word Order, Grammatical Dependencies: Primitives of Syntax.

Syntax Ib: Current Issues in Syntax

The contents of this course will vary from year to year, but it will be mainly concerned with the syntactic representation of grammatical relations and the structural conditions these are subject to. It will normally concentrate on three or four empirical domains that bear on the issue, for example, control, complex versus simplex anaphors, resultative predication or transitive expletive constructions.

Syntax IIa: Interfaces

Syntactic representations are mapped onto phonological and semantic representations at the PF and LF interfaces respectively. This course will deal with the way these interfaces constrain the syntax and the extent to which syntactic operations can be said to be driven by interface requirements. The course will probably mainly address issues in morpho-syntax (such as affixation, cliticisation and bracketing paradoxes, etc.) as well as issues involving prosody (such as focussing, anaphoric destressing and word order).

Syntax IIb: Advances and Perspectives in Syntax

This course concentrates on theoretical work in syntax. It is concerned with foundations that might explain descriptive generalizations and that could provide a framework with the potential to guide and stimulate further empirical research.

Syntax IIc: Syntax Research Seminar

The content of this course will vary from year to year, but will be based on a number of seminal papers in syntactic theory focussing on a small number of topical issues in current syntactic research.

Pragmatics Ia: Introduction to Pragmatics

The course is an introduction to pragmatics (defined as a theory of utterance interpretation or speaker's meaning). Issues discussed include the nature and goals of pragmatics, the role of context in comprehension, the relative roles of coding and inference in verbal communication, and a variety of more specific topics, e.g. disambiguation, explicit vs. implicit communication, metaphor and irony. Rather than briefly surveying several alternative approaches to pragmatics, the course looks in depth at a particular approach (relevance theory), drawing comparisons with other approaches wherever possible.

Pragmatics Ib: Topics in Semantics and Pragmatics

An adequate account of certain aspects of the meaning of utterances often requires the development of semantic and pragmatic analyses in tandem. This applies in particular to the interpretation of the natural language counterparts of logical connectives, such as conjunction, disjunction and negation, to scalar terms and to definite descriptions and other referring expressions. Such accounts developed within neo-Gricean frameworks and within Relevance Theory are compared and assessed.

Pragmatics IIa: Cognitive Aspects of Pragmatics

This course explores the place of pragmatics within a modular view of mental processing and the interface of pragmatic processing with the language faculty, the ‘theory of mind’ system and our more general high-level capacities for problem-solving and reasoning. Relevant experimental data is considered.

Pragmatics IIb: Philosophical Aspects of Pragmatics

This course explores and assesses different ways in which the fundamental distinctions between semantics and pragmatics, and between explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning have been made. Relations between accounts developed within the Philosophy of Language and more recent cognitively-based approaches to these distinctions are investigated.

Pragmatics IIc: Pragmatics Research Seminar

The content of this course will vary from year to year, but will be based on a number of recent important papers in pragmatic theory, focusing on a small number of topical issues in current pragmatic research; for instance, different approaches to lexical pragmatics, the role of default inference in pragmatics, the development of pragmatic competence, kinds of pragmatic impairment.

Syntax option: Optimality Theoretic Syntax

Offered by Vieri Samek-Lodovici, Dept of Italian
This course investigates the application of Optimality Theory to Syntax, thus exploring the potential for a unification of syntax and phonology under a single theoretical framework. The course examines the fundamental properties that distinguish Optimality Theory from other major frameworks and its concrete application to cross-linguistic paradigms involving Italian, English, and other languages.
Contact time: 2h/week for 10 weeks, Second Term only. Assessment: by final paper of about 5000 words, or two short ones by 2500 words each, as determined by course tutor.