Logistics

Instructor

Chris Manning
manning@stanford.edu

Content

What is this course about?

Foundations of Linguistic Theory attempts to give a broader, deeper, and more historical foundation to thinking about the science of language. We will study foundational issues and recurrent themes, and important papers and people across 2500 years of the history of linguistics, but mainly 1800–2000.

Prerequisites

This class is principally intended for Linguistics Ph.D. students beyond their first year. Other students with a strong background of graduate linguistics classes should seek the permission of the instructor prior to enrollment.

Textbook

Reference Texts

Here are a few general reference texts. There are also quite a few others.


Course info

Work before class sessions (15%)

Participation in class sessions (10%)

Leadership roles in class discussions (15%)

You will also have various opportunities to co-lead class discussions. This will be worth 15% of your grade.

Squibs (30%)

There are two squibs to write during the quarter. The first should be related to a topic from the first 4 weeks of class. The second should be related to a topic from weeks 4–6. Each should be 2–3 pages long. The squibs should respond to a reading or two from the syllabus, developing an observation about it or criticism of it. Pointing out relations between the readings or a reading and other work we don't discuss is a good thing to do. They are due in weeks 4 and 7. Each will be worth 15% of your grade. If you have no idea what a squib should look like, here's a reasonably good example from 2022.

Final Paper (30%)

A final paper of 6–8 pages is due at the end of the quarter. It should connect to some theme and readings from the syllabus, but go substantially beyond the syllabus, whether by reading more of a book we’ve read a chapter of, or reading related articles, or looking at some topic that we never got to (von Humboldt, Greenberg, grammaticalization, …). Working together with someone else on this, especially with someone who has complementary expertise, is encouraged. If you’re clever, you might be able to get a head start on material for your final paper while preparing one of the in-class discussions that you lead. As an alternative to a final paper, you can write two more squibs, but only if you are working alone.

Grading basis

If you are taking Linguistics 200 to satisfy the Linguistic Department's Ph.D. course requirements, then you are required to take this course for a letter grade and receive a grade of B or better. If you're taking it just because all this stuff is so interesting, you can take it on a CR/NC basis. If you take the class credit/no credit then you are graded in the same way as those registered for a letter grade. The only difference is that, providing you reach a C− standard in your work, it will simply be graded as CR.

Since the class is for a small group of active participants, auditors are not normally allowed. Please complete all the work for the class during the quarter; I will not give an incomplete (I) grade for the class unless there are compelling extenuating circumstances.

Honor Code

You are expected to follow Stanford’s Honor Code in all matters relating to this course.

Making all students feel welcome

We should all do what we can to work for equity and to create an inclusive learning environment that actively values the diversity of backgrounds, identities, and experiences of everyone in Ling 200. I also know that I will sometimes make missteps. If you notice some way that I could do better, I hope that you will let me know about it.

Well-Being and Mental Health

If you are experiencing personal, academic, or relationship problems and would like to talk to someone with training and experience, you might first reach out to the Graduate Life Office. For student mental health and wellbeing help, reach out to Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), the university’s counseling center. Phone assessment appointments can be made at CAPS by calling 650-723-3785, or by accessing the VadenPatient portal through the Vaden website.

Students with Documented Disabilities

I am committed to ensuring the full participation of all enrolled students in this class. If you need an academic accommodation based on a disability, you should initiate the request with the Office of Accessible Education (OAE). The OAE will evaluate the request, recommend accommodations, and prepare a letter for faculty. Students should contact the OAE as soon as possible and at any rate in advance of assignment deadlines, since timely notice is needed to coordinate accommodations. Students should send the instructor your accommodation letter as soon as possible.

Sexual violence

Academic accommodations are available for students who have experienced or are recovering from sexual violence. If you would like to talk to a confidential resource, you can schedule a meeting with the Confidential Support Team or call their 24/7 hotline at: 650-725-9955. Counseling and Psychological Services also offers confidential counseling services. Non-confidential resources include the Title IX Office, for investigation and accommodations, and the SARA Office, for healing programs. Students can also speak directly with the instructor to arrange accommodations, but note that university employees – including professors and TAs – are required to report what they know about incidents of sexual or relationship violence, stalking and sexual harassment to the Title IX Office. Students can learn more at https://vaden.stanford.edu/sexual-assault.


Schedule

I’ve mainly just left up what we did in 2022. But I'm going to change some things and you’re welcome and encouraged to suggest topics. Everything here beyond next week’s content should be regarded as tentative and subject to change without notice!

Date Description Course Materials Events
Tue Sept 24
Week 1
 The liminal zone between early and modern linguistics
Course Introduction;
Self-introductions and interests;
Sir William Jones (“Oriental Jones”);
Colonial linguistics and the beginnings of comparative linguistics 		Readings (in class; everyone will work in one of these four groups):
  1. What can we learn from Jones’ famous address?
    • William Jones. 1786. The Third Anniversary Discourse (as President of the Asiatick Society of Bengal). In The Works of Sir William Jones, vol. 1, pp. 19–34. (It would be a shame for no one to read until the end of the address; perhaps in the first instance, some people can read Section I and others Sections II and III, and then you can discuss or swap around as time is available.)
  2. Who was William Jones?
  3. A critical perspective: What did Jones actually discover/invent? Maybe not much? Or maybe he did open up new vistas (with good timing)?
  4. How fundamental was the role of Sanskrit and Pāṇini in the formation of modern linguistics (in Europe and the U.S.)? Don’t try to learn everything about all these people, but try to look for the through-lines of the influence of Sanskrit (and Jones) on the foundation of Linguistics as a field.)
Reading (at home, exceptionally, afterwards):
  1. James McElvenny. 2024. A History of Modern Linguistics, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 through section 2.3 (pp. 1–14).
Assign people for week 2
Tue Oct 1
Week 2
 Pāṇini: An early first triumph of formal descriptive linguistics
Levels (mainly phonology and syntax), combinatoriality, simplicity. Sanskrit.
Pāṇini's grammar. It's influence on later linguists.
Grammar as a maximally compact representation of language. Phonological features. Thematic roles. Rule ordering, blocking.
A generative grammar? 		Everyone reads: Pāṇini/Kiparsky experts read:
  • Paul Kiparsky. 2009. On the architecture of Pāṇini’s grammar. In Huet, G., Kulkarni, A., Scharf, P. (eds) Sanskrit Computational Linguistics. LNCS vol. 5402. Berlin: Springer. It's long (sorry)! Let's skip morphology (sorry), but read Sections 1, 2, and 4.
New thinkers read: Counterstrike force. Read the Scharf piece, but you'll almost surely have to consult materials above to help make sense of it. I included the Bodas piece, but you don't have to read it. For most of the class (and me), it is inaccessible. Computationalists could choose to read: 		Assign people for week 3
Tue Oct 8
Week 3

2 hours of class (end about 3:45)		 Historical linguistics
The development of the comparative method;
The Junggrammatiker (Neogrammarians);
Grimm, Brugmann 		Readings:
Everyone not presenting should read 1, 2, 3, 4, and section 5.4.1 of 6, and write 2 discussion comments/questions on each of 1, 3, and 4 (6 comments in total).
The two people presenting “Grimm” (for ~1 hour including discussion) should cover sections 2.4 and 4.1 of McElvenny, 2, 3, and section 5.4.1 of 6.
The two people presenting the Junggrammatiker (for ~1 hour including discussion) should cover chapters 6 and 7 of McElvenny, 4, and skim 5.
  1. James McElvenny. 2024. A History of Modern Linguistics, Section 2.4, Chapter 4 through Section 4.1, and Chapters 6 and 7 (pp. 14-18, 34-37, 58-79. (pp. 1–14).
  2. Sally Thomason. 2007. Fitchifying the history of linguistics. Language Log. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005021.html
  3. Jacob Grimm. 1893. Deutsche Grammatik. Gütersloh: C. Bertelmann, vol. I, pp. 580–592. From Winfred P. Lehmann. 1967/2005. A Reader in Nineteenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Note: This is from a later edition, but it was originally written 1819–1837.
  4. Hermann Osthoff and Karl Brugmann. 1878. Morphologische Untersuchungen auf dem Gebiete der indogermanischen Sprachen, vol. I, pp. iii–xx. Leipzig: S. Hirzel. From Winfred P. Lehmann. 1967/2005. A Reader in Nineteenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics.
  5. Karl Brugmann. 1876. Nasalis sonans in der indogermanischen Grundsprache. Curtius Studien 9: 287–338. From Winfred P. Lehmann. 1967/2005. A Reader in Nineteenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics. (You don't need to read this, but you might look at Lehmann's introduction. I just stuck it here to convey that the Neogrammarians did engage themselves in substantive comparative grammatical work, not just position statements!)
  6. Lyle Campbell. 2013. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, chapter 5. Edinburgh University Press. Minimally review section 5.4.1. (pp. 135–139) for a modern presentation of Grimm's Law. Optionally read as much else as you want on the comparative method.
Assign people for week 4
Tue Oct 15
Week 4
 Semiotics and structuralism
Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson (and the Prague School)
American Structuralism and the emergence of American Linguistics
Boas, Sapir, Bloomfield, Whorf, Hockett, Harris, …. Externalism and Emergentism. General overview of American linguistics 1900-1950. [Chris; no readings]
Readings:
Everyone should read the extract from de Saussure and Chapter 10 of McElvenny. Non-presenters should write 2 discussion comments/questions on each.
We will all discuss de Saussure drawing from everyone’s questions/comments (~50 mins).
Two people each will present Jakobson’s (i) Structuralism and phonology and (ii) Poetics respectively for ~25 mins each, and should read both the relevant article, and the relevant part of Caton's survey of contributions. For the final part of class, Chris will survey American structuralism and the institutionalization of American linguistics.
  1. James McElvenny. 2024. A History of Modern Linguistics, Chapter 10 (Prague School). Of course, Chapter 8 is also there and about de Saussure and Chapters 14 and 16 cover American Structuralism in general, but life is short, so this isn't required reading….
  2. de Saussure: Synchronic vs. diachronic linguistics. Sign. Langue and parole. Semiotics and structuralist linguistics
    1. Ferdinand de Saussure. 1916 [1983]. Course in General Linguistics. Introduction, chapters II and III (pp. 6–17), Part One, chapters I, II, and part of III (pp. 65–89), and Part Two, chapters I to IV (pp. 101–122). [That first link is part of the Wade Baskin translation of 1959. Here is the first part of the reading from the 1983 translation of Roy Harris, which is generally taken to be linguistically better.]
  3. Jakobson: Structuralism and phonology
    1. Steven C. Caton. 1987. Contributions of Roman Jakobson. Annual Review of Anthopology 16: 223–260, pp. 223–237.
    2. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle. 1956. Phonology and Phonetics. In Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle (eds.), Fundamentals of Language, Mouton, The Hague, pp. 1-51. Reprinted in Jakobson's collected works, phonological studies.
  4. Jakobson: Poetics
    1. Roman Jakobson. 1960. Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics. In Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language.
    2. Steven C. Caton. 1987. Contributions of Roman Jakobson. Annual Review of Anthopology 16: 223–260, pp. 238–253.
First squib due! – I'm okay with getting it by end-of-day Friday!
Tue Oct 22
Week 5
 Early Generative Grammar
Noam Chomsky. Early developments in generative grammar. Essentialism.
Readings:
Two people will lead the discussion of Syntactic Structures (~1 hour).
Two people will lead the discussion of Aspects (~1 hour).
Everyone else should read one of the readings for Syntactic Structures or Aspects (let’s try to divide people roughly evenly) and write two discussion comments or questions based on their reading.
If there is extra time, Chris can discuss a bit the subsequent development of generative grammar since Aspects and/or Essentialism.
  1. Chomsky: Syntactic Structures
    1. Noam Chomsky. 1957. Syntactic Structures. THe Hague: Mouton. Preface + Ch. 1–6 (pp. 5–60)
  2. Chomsky: Aspects
    1. Noam Chomsky. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Preface + Ch. 1 (pp. v–62).
Additional sources
  1. Barbara Scholz, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Ryan Nefdt. 2022. Philosophy of Linguistics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [web] [cached pdf].
  2. Biolinguistics (if you only look at one of these, I'd look at the first – it's quite the manifesto; I guess they're trying to compete with the Junggrammatiker!): [Boeckx/Grohmann 2007], [Chomsky 2007], [Boeckx 2013].
  3. Port-Royal: Logic and grammar
Tue Oct 29
Week 6
 The socio-cultural character of language Weinreich, Labov & Herzog; Labov
Readings:
Two people will lead the discussion of Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (~1 hour).
Two people will lead the discussion of Labov: NYC (~1 hour).
Everyone else should read one of the readings and write two discussion comments or questions based on their reading. If you haven’t read either before, I’d recommend Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog.
  1. Uriel Weinreich, William Labov, and Marvin I. Herzog. 1968. Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change. In Directions for Historical Linguistics: A Symposium edited by W. P. Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel, 95–195. A bridge between diachronic and synchronic empirical linguistics; tells its own history of the field. Read through the end of section 2 (p. 150).
  2. William Labov. 1966/2006. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch. 1 and 3. Foundational work of modern sociolinguistics. This extract is from the 40th anniversary edition. Commentary added in 2006 is in square brackets. I'm not sure whether having it is an improvement or not.
Tue Nov 5
Week 7
 Democracy Day: day of civic service (no classes) Second squib due. (I'm okay with getting it by the end of day Friday.)
Tue Nov 12
Week 8
 Semiotics and Signs
Silverstein and C. S. Peirce
Readings:
Two people will lead the discussion of each of Silverstein, Peirce (primary sources), Peirce (secondary articles) for about 50 mins each.
Everyone else should read one of the sets of readings (1–3 below), and write two discussion comments or questions based on their reading by Sunday night.
  1. Michael Silverstein. 1979. Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology. In The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels, edited by Paul R. Clyne, William F. Hanks, and Carol L. Hofbauer, 193–247. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society. Silverstein provides a through-line from Boas to semiotic functionalism and his concept of ideologies.
  2. Nathan Houser et al., ed. 1998. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893–1913). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, “What is a Sign” pp. 4–10, “Pragmatism” pp. 398–421 (i.e., let’s read "Variant 1"), “Excerpts from Letters to Lady Welby” (!) pp. 477–491. Total Peirce readings = 7 + 24 + 15 = 46 pp.
  3. Richard J. Parmentier. 1994. Signs in Society: Studies in Semiotic Anthropology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, chapters 1 and 4 (pp. 3–22; 70–97. Total readings = 20 + 28 = 48 pp.
  4. Extra reference material (not assigned reading): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2022. Peirce's Theory of Signs.
Send a topic proposal for your final paper.
Tue Nov 19
Week 9
 Probability, Information Theory, and Language
Shannon, Gleason, Jelinek, and Sankoff. 		Readings:
  1. Claude Shannon. Shannon essentially invented the field on Information Theory single-handedly, while working at Bell Labs in the late 1940s. We skip his (original, key, longer) more technical exposition.
    1. Warren Weaver. 1949. Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication. In Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, IL: The University of Illinois Press. Ch. 1, pp. 1–28. And also Shannon pp. 31–35 to see the origins of the “noisy channel model” (which dominated probabilistic NLP in the 1990s and 2000s).
    2. Shannon, Claude E. 1951. Prediction and Entropy of Printed English. The Bell System Technical Journal 30(1): 50–64. Read sections 1–3. Total Shannon reading = 40 pages.
  2. David Sankoff. An interesting story between mathematics (statistics) and (socio)linguistics.
    1. Henrietta J. Cedergren and David Sankoff. 1974. Variable Rules: Performance as a Statistical Reflection of Competence. Language 50(2): 333–355.
    2. David Sankoff. 1987. Variable Rules. In Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, and Klaus J. Mattheier (eds.), Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, vol. 2. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Note: There is a second edition from 2004, but, somehow, our library seems to have volumes 1 and 3 but not 2. I do not know whether the article is revised therein.
    3. “Extra” reading, which you do not have to read:, David Sankoff. 1978. Probability and linguistic variation. Synthese 37: 217–238. I threw this one in to give a bit more of an idea how over the decades, David Sankoff has written widely on probability and language, including rates of lexicon change (“glottochronology”), theory of probabilistic context-free grammars, and their use to model code-switching, as well as the variable rules approach, and other topics in sociolinguistics.
  3. Steve Abney. Another interesting story between linguistics and NLP….
    1. Steven Abney. 1996. Statistical Methods and Linguistics. In Judith L. Klavans and Philip Resnik (eds), The Balancing Act: Combining Symbolic and Statistical Approaches to Language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 1–26.
  4. Fred Jelinek. Fred Jelinek was the pioneer at IBM Research who led the adoption of probabilistic models in speech and natural language processing. I don't think it's so useful for this class to dive into his technical work, but these look-backs from Fred himself and Mark Liberman are useful thought fodder. Note that they were both written just before neural network approaches really blossomed in NLP again.
    1. Frederick Jelinek. 2009. The Dawn of Statistical ASR and MT. Computational Linguistics 35(4): 483–494.
    2. Mark Liberman. 2010. Obituary: Fred Jelinek. Computational Linguistics 36(4): 595–599.
Tue Nov 26 Thanksgiving break; no class
Tue Dec 3
Week 10
 Connectionism and its critics Rumelhart & McClelland, Fodor & Pylyshyn, Pinker & Prince
Readings:
The original 1980s papers are, unfortunately, all really, really long!
  1. David E. Rumelhart and James L. McClelland. 1986. On Learning the Past Tenses of English Verbs. In James L. McClelland, David E. Rumelhart, and the PDP Research Group (eds.), Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Volume 2: Psychological and Biological Models,, pp. 216–271. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Read: pp. 216–245 and 261–268 (38 pp.).
  2. Jerry A. Fodor and Zenon W. Pylyshyn. 1988. Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis. Cognition 28(1–2): 3–71. We'll read from the beginning through the end of Section 3 and the conclusion = 48 + 3 = 51 pp.
  3. Steven Pinker and Alan Prince. 1988. On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition 28(1–2): 73–193. This paper is such a long beating with a hammer. Let's read: beginning and section 1 (pp. 73–82), section 3 and 4.0 (pp. 87-96), sections 5, 6, and 7.0 (pp. 123–129), and sections 7.3 and 8 (pp. 164–184) So, in total, 10 + 10 + 7 + 21 = 48 pp.
  4. Steven Pinker and Michael T. Ullman. 2002. The past and future of the past tense. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences 6(11): 456–463. Replies to this article pp. 464–474. We will read the article and the first reply, pp. 456–471. This is a second round rehash of the issues, a paper that is itself now already 20 years old. Subsequent to this time, connectionist models, rebranded as “deep learning” seem for the moment to have basically won….
  5. EXTRA REFERENCE! Seymour Papert. 1988. One AI or Many? Dædalus 117(1): 1–14. This gives some interesting context on the history of neural networks and the return of connectionism, from the perspective of artificial intelligence.
Tue Dec 10 No class!
Final paper due. 		Final paper due

Cutting room floor

Other things that could be on the syllabus but aren't or were on the syllabus in 2022 but now aren’t.

Grammaticalization: Bopp, Humboldt, Meillet, Lehmann, Heine, Traugott (maybe should still try to fit this in a bit, let's see....)
Functionalism: Greenberg, Comrie, Dixon, Croft, Haspelmath
Evolution of Language: Pinker & Bloom, Seyfarth & Cheney: Social Origins of Language, Bruner
Phonology: From Firth to Autosegmental phonology
Roy Harris
Dependency grammar: Arabic, Tesnière, Mel'cuk, more Prague School
Firth and Halliday: Systemic functional grammar
Pragmatics: a reaction to structuralism; Anglo-American (Austin, Searle, Grice, Potts) vs. Continental (Jakobson, Mey, Verschueren, Habermas)

Wilhelm von Humboldt
Readings:
  1. The bringing forth of language is an inner need that evolves humankind (!) and an intro to who Humboldt was.
    1. Wilhelm von Humboldt 1836 [1988]. On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind.. Translated by Peter Heath with an introduction by Hans Aarsleff. Cambridge UP. Chapters 3–5, pp. 54–64.
    2. Hans Aarsleff. 1988. Introduction to On Language, part I, pp. vii–xvii.
  2. The origins of linguistic relativity
    1. Wilhelm von Humboldt 1836 [1988]. On Language. chapter 9, pp. 54–64.
    2. John Leavitt. 2006. Linguisitic Relativities. In Christine Jourdan and Kevin Tuite (eds.) Language, Culture, and Society. Cambridge UP. pp. 47–55.
  3. Beginnings of Linguistic typology
    1. Wilhelm von Humboldt 1836 [1988]. On Language. chapter 19 and 20 to page 168.
    2. Randy La Polla. 2020. Forward to the past: modernizing linguistic typology by returning to its roots. Asian Languages and Linguistics 1(1): 146–166, pp. 1–5.
  4. Chomksy's take on Humboldt
    1. Wilhelm von Humboldt 1836 [1988]. On Language. chapter 8 and 13.
    2. Hans Aarsleff. 1988. Introduction to On Language, part II, pp. xvii–xxxii.
    3. Chomsky. 1964. Current issues in linguistic theory. The Hague: Mouton, chapter 1, pp. 7–27.
American Structuralism
Boas, Sapir, Whorf, Hockett, Harris. Externalism and Emergentism. General overview of American linguistics 1900-1950.

American structuralists: Boas, Sapir, Bloomfield, Harris, Hockett, Whorf, ….
  1. Boas
    1. Franz Boas. 1911. Introduction. Handbook of American Indian Languages, Vol 1. pp. 1–83. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 40. Washington, DC: Government Print Office. Selected interesting parts.
  2. Sapir
    1. Edward Sapir. 1922. Language: An Introduction to the study of speech, Introductory chapter.
    2. Edward Sapir. 1925. Sound patterns of language. Language 1(2): 37-51.
  3. Bloomfield
    Don't forget that we've already seen two papers by Bloomfield (effectively the most important American Structuralist) previously.
  4. Harris
    1. Zellig S. Harris. 1942. Morpheme Alternants in Linguistic Analysis. Language 18(3): 169–180.
    2. Zellig S. Harris. 1946. From morpheme to utterance. Language 22(3): 161–183.
  5. Hockett
    1. Charles F. Hockett. 1954. Two Models of Grammatical Description. Word 10(2–3): 210–234.
  6. Whorf
    1. The Punctual and segmentative aspects of verbs in Hopi.
    2. An American Indian model of the universe.
  7. George Kingsley Zipf. I’m here butting together an extract from Zipf’s 1949 book with George Miller’s introduction to the reprinting of Zipf’s 1935 book. But that seemed to me the best result, since the 1949 version is clearer and more succinct than the 1935 version, while Miller’s later-written introduction provides useful analysis and context.
    1. George Kingsley Zipf. 1949. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An Introduction to Human Ecology. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley. Ch. 2, pp. 19–31.
    2. George A. Miller. 1965. Introduction to the reprinted version of George Kingsley Zipf, The Psycho-Biology of Language (1935). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. v–xii.
  8. Hocket and Gleason. American Structuralist linguists take note. We'll skip the book review by Hockett, but note the amount of space it was given!
    1. Henry A. Gleason. 1955/1961. An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Revised edition, 1961, Ch. 23: The Process of Communication.
    2. Charles F. Hockett. 1953. Review of The Mathematical Theory of communication by Claude L. [Should be E!] Shannon and Warren Weaver. Language 29(1): 69–93.
Semantics: Cognitive/cultural semantics; formal semantics; compositionality
Tomasello, Fillmore; Montague, Lambek; Partee, Pelletier 		Readings:
  1. Michael Tomasello. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Harvard University Press, ch. 1 and 4. Links socio-cultural context of humans to cognitive science.
  2. Charles J. Fillmore. 1985. Frames and the semantics of understanding. Quaderni di Semantica 6(2): 222–254.
  3. Barbara H. Partee. 1984. Compositionality. In Fred Landman and Frank Veltman (eds.), Varieties of Formal Semantics,. Dordrecht: Foris, pp. 281–312.
  4. Francis Jeffry Pelletier. 1994. The Principle of Semantic Compositionality. Topoi 13: 11–24.
Additional sources
  1. Drew McDermott. 1978. Tarskian Semantics, or No Notation Without Denotation!. Cognitive Science 2: 277–282. Incidentally, looking back, it is highly interesting how close cognitive science was to (symbolic) artificial intelligence at this time: Here was the new Cognitive Science journal publishing a paper that clearly expects you to know the basics of Lisp programming, starting from page one and for which 7 of the 9 (!) references are to work by computer scientists. But his was not a weird exception. One of those references is to Bobrow and Winograd's An overview of KRL, a knowledge representation language, which appeared in the first volume.
  2. Chambers, J. K. 1995. Sociolinguistic Theory: Linguistic Variation and its Social Significance. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.