To be supplemented with occasional brief readings from other sources. The final grades will probably diverge slightly from this scale, depending on the distribution of final averages, but you may use the following as a guideline to assess your performance. Please see me after class or during my office hours. All assigned work must be submitted by the end of the scheduled class meeting in which it is due. If you are ill on a due date, or are called away by an emergency, you must call before class on the due date to make appropriate arrangements.
All students are responsible for doing their own work on all assignments, exams and papers.
Cheating on any assignment will result in an F on that assignment. You are welcome to discuss homework assignments with one another, form study groups, etc., but all written work must be in your own words. No prior background in linguistics is required, though you may find it helpful. At the end of the semester, you should have a sense of what human languages can be, not only from a grammatical perspective, but also from a cultural or social perspective. It won't be possible to conduct an exhaustive survey of every phenomenon in every language, so we will necessarily focus on a few key topics in each subsection.