Language, Gender & Sexuality Spring 2008

This course will provide facts, theory, and analytic tools for critiquing claims about gender, sexuality, and language, and the relations among them. Claims and presuppositions bolstering our ‘common sense’ notions of gender and language – especially differences between men and women, boys and girls – are heard daily in the mainstream press and other cultural institutions. Language & gender has been a ‘hot’ topic in linguistics, producing lots of engaging work re-examining such claims and assumptions.

Sociolinguistic Field Methods, Winter 2008

This course will give you experience designing and carrying out a field-based sociolinguistic research project of current significance in the field. The course has three goals: 1) To give you a critical appreciation for the fieldwork tradition in sociolinguistics and related social sciences; 2) To provision your methodological toolkit with ways of observing language and making sense of the social worlds in which language becomes meaningful; and 3) To investigate the Northern/Midlands dialect boundary as proposed in the Atlas of North American English (ANAE) (Labov et al. 2006).

Introduction to Language  Spring 2007

This course provides a general overview of the cognitive organization of linguistic structure and the social nature of language use. Why language learning is hard; how languages differ from one another and how they are the same; how and why speakers of the same language speak differently; how language is used strategically. The course will be very ‘hands-on’, teaching you how to solve problems based on datasets from diverse languages.

Seminar: Language & Identity (Graduate) Winter 2007