LINGUIST 197: Undergraduate Research Seminar

Spring 2021 Dan Jurafsky

Senior capstone seminar: Joint readings in an annually varying topic, exploring the implications and importance of linguistic research for other domains of knowledge or practice.

Syllabus

Week	Date	Chair	Topics
2	Apr 9	Isabella	Child Directed Speech Qualities Ferguson, Brock, and Sandra Waxman. "Linking language and categorization in infancy." Journal of child language 44, no. 3 (2017): 527. Baby Talk is a Universal Language Christopher Bergland. 2020. Baby Talk is a Universal Language Psychology Today, April 5, 2020, The Athlete's Way blog.
3	Apr 16	Annika	Semiotics and Linguistics Course in General Linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure) Part One, Chapter 1: Nature of the Linguistic Sign and Introduction, Chapter 1: A Glance at the History of Linguistics. Video: What is Semiotics? David Chandler's Semiotics: The Basics Pages 1-4 and 11-13
4	Apr 23	Isabella	Linguistic Appropriation Hill, Jane. 1998. Language, Race, and White Public Space. American Anthropologist, 100(3):680-689. Guo, Jeff. 2016. How Iggy Azalea mastered her ‘blaccent’. Washington Post, Jan 4 2016.
5	Apr 30	Jane and Dean	Meaning change in novel lexical items and How does social media change how we communicate online? A Computational Evaluation of Two Laws of Semantic Change (Xu and Kemp, 2015) How Nicknames for the Pandemic Became a Popular Online Trend Because Internet selection Trailer for The Social Dilemma
6	May 7	All	Capstone Questions
7	May 14	Will	What does analysis of neural language models tell us about language?
8	May 21	Dean	Jokes and Humor
9	May 28	Jane	Bias in Language Datasets
10	June 4	Annika	Bias in Language Datasets

Course Information

Logistics

Instructor: Dan Jurafsky (jurafsky@stanford.edu)
Office: Margaret Jacks 117
Office Hours: Tuesdays 4:15-6:00
Course Description: Senior capstone seminar. Joint readings in an annually varying topic, exploring the implications and importance of linguistic research for other domains of knowledge or practice.

Required Work

Weekly reading, a written commentary each week on the reading, and discussion of the weekly reading. In addition, each student will be leading discussion for a weekly topic.

List of topics from prior years

List of prior topics