LINGUIST 197a:
Senior Capstone Seminar

What counts as a language?

• Hockett, Charles F., "The origin of speech." Scientific American 203, no. 3 (1960): 88-97.
• Hauser, Marc D., Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch. "The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?" Science 298, no. 5598 (2002): 1569-1579.

Idiolect Change

• Stevens, Mary, and Jonathan Harrington. 2014. The individual and the actuation of sound change. Loquens 1, no. 1 (2014): 003 [Read Section 4 only]
• Harrington, Jonathan, Sallyanne Palethorpe, and Catherine I. Watson. 2000. Does the Queen speak the Queen's English?. Nature 408, no. 6815 (2000): 927.

Diffusion of Lexical Change in the Internet Era

• Gretchen McCulloch. 2019. Because Internet. Chapter 2, Language and Society.
• Eisenstein, Jacob, Brendan O'Connor, Noah A. Smith, and Eric P. Xing. 2014. Diffusion of lexical change in social media. PloS one 9, no. 11 (2014).

Language and Thought

• Winawer, Jonathan, Nathan Witthoft, Michael C. Frank, Lisa Wu, Alex R. Wade, and Lera Boroditsky. 2007. Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences 104, no. 19: 7780-7785.
• Pyers, Jennie E., Anna Shusterman, Ann Senghas, Elizabeth S. Spelke, and Karen Emmorey. 2010. Evidence from an emerging sign language reveals that language supports spatial cognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 27 (2010): 12116-12120.
• Fausey, Caitlin M., and Lera Boroditsky. 2011. Who dunnit? Cross-linguistic differences in eye-witness memory. Psychonomic bulletin and review 18:1, 150-157.

Discourse Theory & Information Structure

• Arnold, J. E., Kaiser, E., Kahn, J. M., and Kim, L. K. (2013). Information structure: linguistic, cognitive, and processing approaches. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 4(4), [read pages 403-409 (just the first 2 paragraphs of 409)]
• Prince, Ellen F. 1981. Towards a taxonomy of given-new information. In Radical pragmatics, edited by Peter Cole. Academic. (1981). [pages 223-237]
• Lee, Yong-cheol, Bei Wang, Sisi Chen, Martine Adda-Decker, Angélique Amelot, Satoshi Nambu, and Mark Liberman. 2015. A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus. In 2015 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (pp. 4754-4758). IEEE.

Grammatical Gender: Cognitive and Social Implications

• Vigliocco, G., Vinson, D., Paganelli, F., & Dworzynski, K. (2005). Grammatical Gender Effects on Cognition: Implications for Language Learning and Language Use. Journal of Experimental Psychology 134.
• Annabelle Timsit. The Push to Make French Gender-Neutral. The Atlantic. November 24, 2017.

Language and Modernity

• Lee, Jamie Shinhee. "Linguistic constructions of modernity: English mixing in Korean television commercials." Language in society 35, no. 1 (2006): 59-91.

Can AI 'understand' Human Language"?

• John Pavlos. Machines Beat Humans on a Reading Test. But Do They Understand?. Quanta Magazine. [read "A Powerful Recipe" and "Clever but Not Smart" carefully and you can skim the rest]
• Kevin Clark, Urvashi Khandelwal, Omer Levy and Christopher D. Manning. 2019. What does BERT look at? An Analysis of BERT's Attention. BlackboxNLP, 2019. [Read the introduction and Section 4]

Endangered Languages

• Hale, Ken, Michael Krauss, Lucille J. Watahomigie, Akira Y. Yamamoto, Colette Craig, LaVerne Masayesva Jeanne, and Nora C. England. "Endangered languages." language 68, no. 1 (1992): 1-42. [read Watahomigie & Yamamoto, pg. 10-17, and optionally Hale, pg. 35-41]
• Ladefoged, Peter. "Another view of endangered languages." Language 68, no. 4 (1992): 809-811

Conlangs

• Blanke, D. (2009). Causes of the relative success of Esperanto. Language Problems and Language Planning, 33(3), 251-266.
• Schwindt, O. (2019). Dothraki spoken here. Vox.

The Linguistics of Deception

• Meibauer, Jörg. 2018. "The linguistics of lying." Annual Review of Linguistics 4: 357-375. Read sections 3, 4, and 5 (Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics)
• Newman, Matthew L., James W. Pennebaker, Diane S. Berry, and Jane M. Richards. 2003. "Lying words: Predicting deception from linguistic styles.". Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 29, 5:665-675. Read whole paper
• Sweetser, Eve. 1987. "The definition of lie." In Holland and Quinn (eds.), Cultural models in language and thought. Pages 43-66. Start reading on page 44 (section "a cultural model of language"), and read through page 48 (stopping at section "prevarication in a simplified world"), and take a look at figure 2.1

Accent/Variety Silencing and Languagelessness

• Rosa, Jonathan Daniel. 2016. "Standardization, racialization, languagelessness: Raciolinguistic ideologies across communicative contexts." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26, no. 2 (2016): 162-183. [Read from "Theorizing Standardization, Racialization, and Languagelessness" (pg. 164) through "Languagelessness across Scales of Educational Language Policy" (pg. 173).]
• Dragojevic, Marko, Dana Mastro, Howard Giles, and Alexander Sink. 2016. "Silencing nonstandard speakers: A content analysis of accent portrayals on American primetime television." Language in Society 45, no. 1 (2016): 59-85. [Read from "The Present Study" (pg. 65) to the end.]

Labeling

• Walton, Gregory M., and Mahzarin R. Banaji. "Being what you say: The effect of essentialist linguistic labels on preferences." Social Cognition 22, no. 2 (2004): 193-213. [Read Introduction, Experiments 1 and 2, and of the General Discussion just pages 205-6 plus page 209 "Implications for language and cognition"]
• Heyman, Gail D., and Susan A. Gelman. "Preschool children's use of trait labels to make inductive inferences." Journal of experimental child psychology 77, no. 1 (2000): 1-19. [Read paragraph 1 of the introduction, and Experiment 1]
• Goff, Phillip Atiba, Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Melissa J. Williams, and Matthew Christian Jackson. "Not yet human: implicit knowledge, historical dehumanization, and contemporary consequences." Journal of personality and social psychology 94, no. 2 (2008): 292. [Read only Study 6 (page 303-304)]

Language Policies

• Wee, Lionel. "`Burdens' and `handicaps' in Singapore's language policy: on the limits of language management." Language Policy 9, no. 2 (2010): 97-114. [Read from the bottom of p100 (Governing...) to p105 after the quote, and the implications section from p111 - p113.]
• Catedral, Lydia, and Madina Djuraeva. "Language ideologies and (im) moral images of personhood in multilingual family language planning." Language Policy 17, no. 4 (2018): 501-522. [Skip the intro and conclusion, and read the transcripts of all four of the interview excerpts themselves, but the discussion parts of only two: "Fix the mistake" and "Hopefully she will learn Uzbek" from p513 - p517.]

Metaphor

• Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 2008. Metaphors We Live By. Universty of Chicago Press. 3-13 (Chapter 1-3) and Ch. 20 "Closeness is Strength of Effect" section (bottom of p. 128-top of p. 132)
• Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature. Penguin, 2007. p. 247-251 (stop at "Beneath the Metaphor")

Linguistics of Jokes and Humor

• Attardo, Salvatore. Humor in Language. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. [Read just the first 6 pages, til "Current Trends"]
• Marta Dynel. 2009. Beyond a Joke: Types of Conversational Humour. Language and Linguistics Compass 3/5 (2009): 1284-1299.

Orthographic Issues

• Taylor, Insup. "The Korean writing system: an alphabet? A syllabary? A logography?." In Processing of visible language, pp. 67-82. Springer, Boston, MA, 1980. [Read from beginning til the top of page 75 (don't read "experiments on korean writing system") then read conclusion (pg 80)]
• Caravolas, Marketa. "Spelling development in alphabetic writing systems: A cross-linguistic perspective." European Psychologist 9, no. 1 (2004): 3-14. [Start on "general characteristics of alphabetic orthographies" on pg 4 and read til the end]

Ethical Issues

• Rice, Keren. "Ethical Issues in Linguistic Fieldwork." The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Fieldwork. [18.2 and 18.5 only]
• Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. "Research Adventures on Indigenous Land." Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. [Read Chapter 4 only]
• Brice, Anne. 2018. "For Native American student, reclaiming his culture began at Berkeley." . Berkeley News. [read whole article, think about the implications]

Is there a moral obligation to protect endangered languages?

• Krauss, Michael. 1992. The world's languages in crisis. Language 68, no. 1 (1992): 4-10.
• Mufwene, Salikoko S. 2006. "Language Endangerment: An Embarrassment for Linguistics" In Proceedings from the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 111-140. Chicago Linguistic Society, 2006.
• Ladefoged, Peter. 1992. Another view of endangered languages. Language Vol. 68, No. 4. (Dec., 1992), pp. 809-81

Language Revival: What does it mean for it to be successful?

• Dorian, N. C. (1994). Purism vs. compromise in language revitalization and language revival. Language in society, 23(04), 479-494.
• Hinton, L., and Ahlers, J. (1999). The issue of "authenticity" in California language restoration. Anthropology and education quarterly, 30(1), 56-67.
• Schism fears for Gaeilgeoirí
• Hinton, Leanne. 3. Language revitalization. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 23 (2003): 44-57.

Linguistics of Social Media

• A Linguist Explains the Grammer of Doge
• Schnoebelen, Tyler. 2012. Do You Smile With a Nose? Stylistic Variation in Emoticons. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 18:2.
• Skim this: Cunha, Evandro, Gabriel Magno, Giovanni Comarela, Virgilio Almeida, Marcos André Gonçalves, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2011. Analyzing the dynamic evolution of hashtags on twitter: a language-based approach. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Languages in Social Media, pp. 58-65. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2011.
• Read just section 3.4 on page 51 of this: Wang, Aobo, Tao Chen, and Min-Yen Kan. 2012. "Re-tweeting from a Linguistic Perspective." In Proceedings of the second workshop on language in social media, pp. 46-55. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2012
• Anne Curzan. 2013. Slash Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore. Lingua Franca blog, Chronicle of Higher Education.
• How the Hashtag Changed the way We Communicate

Are all languages equally complex?

• McWhorter, John. 2001. The world's simplest grammars are creole grammars. Linguistic typology 5, no. 2/3 (2001): 125-166. Read 125-135, (skim 135-141), 141-143, 154-155 (section 4.4).
• Trudgill, Peter. 2012. On the sociolinguistic typology of linguistic complexity loss. In Potentials of Language Documentation: Methods, Analyses, and Utilization, ed. by Frank Seifart, Geoffrey Haig, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Dagmar Jung, Anna Margetts, and Paul Trilsbeek, pp. 90-95
• Patrick Juola. 2007. Assessing Linguistic Complexity. In Miestamo, Matti, Kaius Sinnemaki and Fred Karlsson (eds.) Language Complexity: Typology, Contact, Change. Amsterdam : John Benjamins Press. Read pages 1-3, 12-15, 18-22, optional (but recommended) 22-35

Linguistics of Advertising and Branding

• Colleen Ross. 2011. The slinky, seductive sound of brand names. (On sound symbolism in branding, quoting Will Leben at Lexicon.)
• Rob Munro and Tyler Schnoebelen. 2014. How to sell a car on social media.
• Dan Jurafsky. 2013. Why Ice Cream Sounds Fat and Crackers Sound Skinny. Stanford Magazine, July/August 2013.
• Dan Jurafsky. 2011. Potato Chips, which is the short blog entry that summarizes Freedman and Jurafsky 2011.

Language and Political Persuasion

• Julie Sedivy. 2011. "Presupposition and boasting instructions for politicians". Language Log
• Teenie Matlock. 2012. Framing Political Messages with Grammar and Metaphor. American Scientist 2012 no 6.
• BBC News Magazine Monitor. 2013. North Korea's way with extreme insults
• VOA News. 2010. 'Pyongyangologists' Study North Korean Propaganda for Clues

Whorf: Language, Thought, and Culture

• Fausey, C. and Boroditsky, L. (2011). Who dunnit? Cross-linguistic differences in eye-witness memory. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review: Volume 18, Issue 1, Pages 150-157. doi:10.3758/s13423-010-0021-5
• Chen, M. Keith. "The effect of language on economic behavior: Evidence from savings rates, health behaviors, and retirement assets." The American Economic Review 103, no. 2 (2013): 690-731. And his language log post here.
• John McWhorter. 2014 : WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT? Languages Conditioning Worldviews. www.edge.org
• John McWhorter. 2014. The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language. Oxford.

Laguage and Music

• Slevc, L. Robert, and Akira Miyake. "Individual Differences in Second-Language Proficiency Does Musical Ability Matter?." Psychological Science 17, no. 8 (2006): 675-681.
• Donnay, Gabriel F., Summer K. Rankin, Monica Lopez-Gonzalez, Patpong Jiradejvong, and Charles J. Limb. 2014. "Neural Substrates of Interactive Musical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of `Trading Fours' in Jazz." PloS one 9, no. 2 (2014): e88665.
• Aniruddh D Patel. 2003. Language, music, syntax and the brain. Nature Neuroscience 6:7 674-681
• Erin McMullen and Jenny R. Saffran. 2004. Music and Language: A Developmental Comparison. Music Perception Spring 2004, Vol. 21, No. 3, 289-311

Societal Implications of Language Learning

• Hart, Betty, and Todd R. Risley. 1995. Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Paul H Brookes Publishing.
• Fernald, A., Marchman, V. A. and Weisleder, A. (2012). SES differences in language processing skill and vocabulary are evident at 18 months. Developmental Science.

Metaphor

• Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. 1-26 and 56-68
• Thibodeau, Paul H., and Lera Boroditsky. "Metaphors we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning." PLoS One 6, no. 2 (2011): e16782.

Linguistics of Courtship and Sex

• The Guardian on McFarland, Jurafsky, Rawlings
• The results table from Ranganath et al (2013)
• Keltner, Dacher, Randall C. Young, Erin A. Heerey, Carmen Oemig, and Natalie D. Monarch. "Teasing in hierarchical and intimate relations." Journal of personality and social psychology 75, no. 5 (1998): 1231.
• Ehrlich, Susan. "The discursive reconstruction of sexual consent." Discourse & Society 9.2 (1998): 149-171.

Linguistics, Literature and the Humanities

• Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. Verso, 2013.
• J. N. Shurkin. 2012. Using social networks to analyze the classics Inside Science.
• Jockers, Matthew L. and David Mimno. 2013. "Significant Themes in 19th-Century Literature." Poetics.

Linguistics of Deception

• Larcker, David F., and Anastasia A. Zakolyukina. "Detecting deceptive discussions in conference calls." Journal of Accounting Research 50, no. 2 (2012): 495-540.
• Ott, Myle, Yejin Choi, Claire Cardie, and Jeffrey T. Hancock. "Finding deceptive opinion spam by any stretch of the imagination." In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies-Volume 1, pp. 309-319. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2011.

Linguistics and Decipherment

• Mystery Voynich manuscript gets preliminary alphabet
• Knight, Kevin, Beáta Megyesi, and Christiane Schaefer. 2012. "The Secrets of the Copiale Cipher." Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism 2, no. 2 (2012): 314-324.

Historical Linguistics, Archaeology, Evolution

• Sicoli, Mark A., and Gary Holton. "Linguistic Phylogenies Support Back-Migration from Beringia to Asia." PloS one 9, no. 3 (2014): e91722.
• Gray, Russell D., and Quentin D. Atkinson. "Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin." Nature 426, no. 6965 (2003): 435-439.
• J. Nichols and T. Warnow, "Tutorial on computational linguistic phylogeny." Linguistics and Language Compass, Vol. 2, Issue 5, September 2008, pages 760-820.

Conversation Offline and Online

• Stephen C. Levinson. 1983. Pragmatics. Chapter 6: Conversational Structure. Just Section 6.4, pages 345-364.

• Herring, S. C. (2013). Relevance in computer-mediated conversation. In S. C. Herring, D. Stein, and T. Virtanen (Eds.), Handbook of pragmatics of computer-mediated communication (pp. 245-268). Berlin: Mouton.