Introduction to Linguistics
LING S110 (CRN: 30233)
Instructors: Squid Tamar-Mattis
Dates: Session B, June 30 - August 1, 2025
Course Mode: In-Person
Meeting Times: MWF 9.00-11.15
Distributional Requirements: Social Sciences
Eligibility: Open to pre-college and college students
In-person Course. This is a course about language as a window into the human mind and language as glue in human society. Nature, nurture, or both? Linguistics is a science that addresses this puzzle for human language. Language is one of the most complex of human behaviors, but it comes to us without effort. Language is common to all societies and is typically acquired without explicit instruction. Human languages vary within highly specific parameters. The conventions of speech communities exhibit variation and change over time within the confines of universal grammar, part of our biological endowment. The properties of universal grammar are discovered through the careful study of the structures of individual languages and comparison across languages. This course introduces analytical methods that are used to understand this fundamental aspect of human knowledge. In this introductory course students learn about the principles that underlay all human languages, and what makes language special. We study language sounds, how words are formed, how humans compute meaning, as well as language in society, language change, and linguistic diversity. 1 Credit. Session B: June 30 – August 1. Tuition: $5270.
Yale Summer Session 2025