Teaching

The following is information regarding some recent graduate courses in linguistics I have taught recently. I like sharing my materials and getting feed-back from colleagues so if you'd like detailed syllabi or reading lists please contact me.

Seminar on theoretical linguistics: Falsehood: A Machiavellian seminar.  (Currently going on, Spring 2025)

What kind of speech act would make Pinocchio’s nose grow? The problem of insincere speech, has preoccupied many a brilliant mind. In this class we will use dishonest speech (lies, deceptions, misdirections, misrepresentations, palter, bullshit, truthiness, humbug, dogwhistles, propaganda, statistics etc.) as an empirical playground to understand key notions in the study of linguistic meaning: speech act theory, presuppositions and common ground, implicatures and so forth. We will look at the connection between lies and the legal concepts of perjury, fraud, libel and defamation. We will consider the possibility that what constitutes a lie might be a culture-bound concept. Finally, we will also study why we are such suckers (according to Shakespeare and Cognitive Science). We will explore avenues for empirical research and possible dissertation topics.

Seminar on bilingualism: Code-switching and linguistic theory

Topics covered: Matrix Language Frame/ 4-M model; Minimalism and the Null Theory; Code-switching insights for linguistic theory; children's code-mixing; phonology/phonetics of code-switching; Code-Blending; Distributed Morphology and the Integrated Model.

Advanced syntax.

Topics covered: 1. General properties of A-bar movement: wh-movement; successive cyclic movement; relativized minimality/minimal link; relative clauses; null operators;  clitic left dislocations, topicalizations, focus movement. 2. Interfaces: Logical Form and the syntax-semantics interface; wh-movement and prosody (Richards' contiguity theory). 3. Grammar and processing.

Semantics and pragmatics - Introduction

The goal of this course is to present a panoramic view of the linguistic fields that focus on linguistic interpretation. The approach employed in the semantics lessons falls within what is usually referred to as formal semantics or model-theoretic semantics – however, we will focus more on the description of linguistic phenomena than on formal analysis. In the pragmatics section, we will study Grice’s model and its successors. We will discuss the classic themes in this type of course: reference, sense, truth, lexical meaning, implicatures and presuppositions, compositional semantics of phrases and sentences, quantifiers, intensional contexts, modality, conditionals, tense, aspect and mood.

Seminar on theoretical linguistics: lexical semantics

Lexical semantics studies those aspects of word meaning that find an expression in the linguistic system, particularly syntax. Part 1 of the seminar focuses on general problems in argument projection, in particular theta roles and event structure. Part 2 switches our attention to argument projection in nominalizations.