Issues in Linguistics. A critical investigation of major intellectual trends in the recent history of linguistics and their relationship to contemporary issues in philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. Scientific investigation of grammatical structure in language. Data from English and other languages are used to study phrase structure, empty categories, movement, etc. The nature of sound systems in human language.
Students investigate data from a variety of languages and language families.
The formal properties of phonological operations and representations are considered, with particular emphasis on metrical structure and other suprasegmental phenomena.