Course Description
Introduction to the study and theory of language as it is actually used by people in speech and writing. Regional and social language variation and variation in text corpora will both be considered, as will the relationship of language variation to language change.
Athena Title
Language and Complex Systems
Prerequisite
LING 2100 or LING 2100H or LING 2100E or permission of department
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
This course discusses the common confusion between different approaches to linguistics and language study, and provides a general theoretical framework under which empirically-based investigation of speech can be carried out. This course will first step back from the modern practices of linguistics in order to examine the choices available for language study, as usefully categorized a century ago by Saussure. Then, the course will consider empirical evidence from real speech, primarily from survey research and corpus linguistics but also from other empirical studies of language in use, to answer the question "What model of human language does this evidence lead us to build." In particular, such study will introduce students to language variation and will consider how the fact of variation should condition how one thinks about language. Language as people use it creates expectations among professional linguists and the public that have strong implications for social and educational policy. All students will be expected to produce about 20 pages of writing about the issues of the course.
Topical Outline
Particular sub-topics will vary from semester to semester, especially to keep pace with emerging new research in empirical linguistics. 1. Introduction. The course will begin with the perennial interest of the public in language variation and document some problematic cases of variation, such as the Ebonics debate and language standards in education. 2. Saussure. Discussion will turn to Saussure's decision to prefer the "linguistics of linguistic structure" as opposed to "the linguistics of speech." The course will revisit Saussure's description of the "linguistics of speech" and its separation from other relevant fields (prescription, philology, psychology/anthropology). This section will also differentiate the principal modern modes of linguistics (structural, generative, Firthian), including discussion of dialectology and sociolinguistics. 3. Evidence from Linguistic Survey Research. This section will discuss evidence from linguistic survey research, for which UGA is a national center, including discussion of categorization, tabulation, and mapping of findings. 4. Social Variability. This section will discuss statistical processing of variation data, including techniques that integrate multiple regional and social association of individual linguistic features. 5. Evidence from Corpus Linguistics. This section will consider basic findings of corpus linguistics, primarily as developed in the work of Biber, Halliday, Sinclair, and Stubbs. Particular topics include text types and collocation. 6. Speech, Power Laws, and Models of Language. This section will address the question of what is "linguistic" about the distributions of language variants and will argue that speech conforms to the characteristics of complexity science as developed in the physical and natural sciences. Non-linear distributions and scaling will be treated as primary characteristics of speech distributions. 7. Linguistic Perception. This section will address the findings of perceptual language variationists, such as Preston and Tamasi. Further, the model of language production will be extended to include the creation of "observational artifacts" that correspond to "language systems" as traditionally associated with "speech communities," and to address cognitive models for language. 8. Applications. This section will consider applications of the complex systems model for speech that emerges from study of language variation, including the relationship between language variation and language change, and speech and public policy.
Syllabus