Language learning can be put under three broad perspectives. Some believe language is pairing of lexicon and syntax i.e. of words and the set of rules that defines how we can combine those words most fundamental of these rules are innate i.e. they are already there in the human mind before it is exposed to society. This means there is perhaps an innate Language Faculty. Still others believe that General Cognitive Abilities that account for other kinds of learning can also account for language. There are many others who strongly believe that language is essentially socially embedded and that all learning takes place through social interactions. This course will briefly account for the most convincing position and will argue for it from generative perspective and biological foundations of language. Throughout the course we will try to be familiar with relationship between language and human mind; to understand language as a special purpose cognitive ability; and to understand underlying mental computation for natural language processing.
We will have a total of 8 weeks for this course. Every week we will have 5 video lectures of 20 minutes each.
COURSE INSTRUCTOR
Rajesh Kumar PhD (Illinois)
Associate Professor
Office: HSB 345
I I T Madras
Chennai - 600036.
Phone : +91 (44) 2257 4537
Week One- On Language
What is Language?
What is scientific about language?
How is language constitutive of being human?
Distinction between human and non-human language
Origin of language
What is the relationship between language and mind?
How do children acquire language?
Nature of learning language
Generative foundation of language acquisition
Biological foundation of Language
Language acquisition device
Universal grammar
Week Two- Language in Mind
Acquisition and/or learning
I-language and Innateness
Patterns – Universal Grammar
Human Brain
Language deficit/ loss
Week Three- Patterns in sounds and words
Sounds
Vowels/Consonants
Places and manners of articulation
Features of sounds
Week Four- Words and sentences
Words
Constraints of patterns in words
Cluster as constraints
Syllables
Week Five- Grammar
Parts of sentences
Subjects/ Predicates
Lexical categories
Functional categories
Nature of verbs
Week Six- Advanced Grammar
Complement/ adjunct
Restrictions
Semantic relations
Case
Movement
Week Seven- Levels of representation and principles of grammar
Movement/displacement
Motivation for the movement
Complementizer phrase
Case assignment
Passive morphology and NP movement
D structure
Binding theory
Indices and antecedents
Co-indexing
Constraints
Week Eight- On language and mind
Compound verb
Negation
Language and Cognition
Goal of cognitive sciences
Computational linguistics- goals, breakthroughs and challenges
Language and mind
READINGS
Chomsky, N. (2006). Language and Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Harris, C.L. (2003). ‘Language and cognition’. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. London: MacMillan.
Hauser, M.D., Chomsky, N., and Fitch, W.T. (2002). ‘Faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?’ Science, 298, 1569-1579.
Jackendoff, R. (1993). Patterns in human mind. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Jackendoff, R. (2014). ‘How did language begin?’ Retrieved from http://www.linguisticsociety.org/files/LanguageBegin.pdf
Pinker, S. and Jackendoff, R. (2004). ‘The faculty of language: What’s special about it?’ Cognition, 95, 201-236.
Pool, G. (2011). Syntactic theory (2 ed). London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan
NOTE:
Exam dates: March 22nd / 29th 2015; 1 PM to 4 PM
Exam Registration URL: https://www.digialm.com/EForms/configuredHtml/885/1958/login.html
Exam registration open till Feb 27th 2015 5 PM.
Certificate will have the test score, which is a combination of your assignment scores and exam score. Only those who have already enrolled in this course will be able to register for the exam.
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