Courses
- Ling 105. THE MIND AND LANGUAGE.
Conceptual systems and language from the perspective of cognitive science. How language gives insight into conceptual structure, reasoning, category-formation, metaphorical understanding, and the framing of experience. Cognitive versus formal linguistics. Implications from and for philosophy, anthropology, literature, artificial intelligence, and politics. - Ling 106. METAPHOR
The role of metaphor in structuring our everyday language, conceptual system, and world view. Topics include cross-cultural differences, literary metaphor, sound symbolism, and related theoretical issues in philosophy, linguistics, psychology and anthropology. - Ling 109. NEURAL BASIS OF THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE.
This is a course on the current status of interdisciplinary studies that seeks to answer the following questions: (1) How is it possible for the human brain, which is a highly structured network of neurons, to think and to learn, use, and understand language? (2) How are language and thought related to perception, motor control, and our other neural systems, including social cognition? (3) How do the computational properties of neural systems and the specific neural structures of the human brain shape the nature of thought and language? Much of the course will focus on the Neural Theory of Language (NTL), which seeks to answer these questions in terms of architecture and mechanism, using models and simulations of language and learning phenomena. - Ling 203. COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND SOCIAL INQUIRY.
- Ling 205. ADVANCED COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS.
This will be an advanced course in cognitive linguistics. Among the topics covered will be cognitive bases for aspects of grammatical structure, cognitive constraints on language change and grammaticalization, and motivations for linguistic universals (i.e., constraints on variability).