The goal is to offer a broad, self-contained introduction
to all aspects of language and linguistics, suitable for undergraduates
with a wide range of backgrounds and intereests. General information about
course content is available from a brief
description . Details can be gotten from the schedule
and the lecture notes that are linked to it.
Although it is not now a prerequisite for other courses
in linguistics at Penn ,
this course will prepare you to get more out of any other linguistics courses
you decide to take. Here
is a link to available home pages of other Penn linguistics courses.
Here is the
complete list of Penn linguistics courses.
Each student should also participate in one recitation sections each week. The number of recitation sections will depend on the enrollment. The purpose of the recitation sections is to provide students with a forum for discussion and an opportunity to ask questions about lectures, readings, homework and quizzes.
The instructors can be reached by email , either to answer questions directly or to set up individual appointments.
There will be a midterm (on October 22), and a final exam (on December 15).
Other introductory linguistics texts include
Contemporary
Linguistics by O'Grady, Dobrovolsky and Aronoff;
An
Introduction to Language by Fromkin and Rodman;
Linguistics
by Akmajian, Demers, Farmer and Harnish; and
An
Invitation to Cognitive Science: Language by Gleitman and Liberman.
These will be on reserve in van Pelt, along with a range
of more specific works.
Because of this email may sometimes be important, we hope you will read your mail regularly. If reading email is a problem for you, please let us know.
The course home
page and its links are even more important! The most important
link is the schedule
, which will tell you what topics will be discussed in each lecture, and
what pages in the text should be read when. It also will contain links
to the lecture notes for the course.
A lot of necessary material, including lecture notes and some readings, will only be available through the web. While you are of course welcome to print these pages out if you want, we will not normally print them out for you. Some of the pages will be interactive, and therefore not printable.
If you don't have access to a computer with internet access
and a reasonably new web browser, or if accessing the internet is a problem
for you for any other reason, please let us know right away!
"How much of this stuff will be on the exam?"Even one level down, you will find a lot of detailed material, and some of it is complex or difficult. For instance, the online lecture notes on Approaches to the study of language mention Norbert Wiener, and include a link to an American Mathematical Society page describing his contributions to mathematics. The same lecture reference a fairly long poem by Walt Whitman .
Relax, you aren't responsible for anything on the AMS page -- though it would be a fine idea to learn any amount of it that you want! Nor are you required to memorize the Whitman poem, or even read it all the way through -- though it's well worth reading.
Quiz and exam questions will cover only material in the text, in lectures, in homework assignments, in the on-line lecture notes, and in linked pages whose contents the lecture notes explicitly say that you should learn.
You'll get a lot more out of the course if you follow
the other links, however, and even some of the links that they point to.
What you find will reinforce the textbook and lectures, and so it will
also help you to do better on the exams and quizzes.
[On to the next lecture] 