YALP 2024 Course Descriptions 


Democracy and Religious Freedom 

Jon Mahoney


What are the limits to religious freedom? Should religious minorities be granted exemptions from laws that apply to everyone else? What does it mean to say that citizens in a democratic society have an obligation to tolerate citizens who affirm different religious beliefs?


Are there reasons to support different approaches to religious freedom in different religious and cultural contexts? For example, is the American First Amendment a model for religious freedom one that should be applied in Turkey among other possible contexts? This mini course will examine these and related questions from several perspectives. First, we will consider different views about democracy and religious freedom. Second, we will consider some debates about religious freedom in Western democracies, including the US, where the First Amendment guarantees religious freedom and rights against state endorsement of sectarian religious beliefs. Thirdly, religious freedom and toleration mean different things to people in different political and religious contexts. For example, Christians are a global minority (about 30% of the global population), and most people do not live in Western democracies. A rich appreciation for what it means to defend religious freedom requires that we think about these issues from a global point of view, and not just our own point of view. Obviously, we cannot consider democracy and religious freedom in all contexts in a single mini-course, but in an effort to avoid an overly parochial perspective a central part of the course will consider democracy and religious freedom in some non-western and non-Christian majority states.





Introduction to Machine Learning (ML) for Linguistics

Markus Egg


This class offers an introduction to Machine Learning (ML) for linguistics. In ML, computer systems are applied to data, with the goal of automatically extracting specific information from them. In a second step, the acquired information is used for analysing large amounts of new data or for generating new linguistic utterances. ML is widely used in current empirical research on all levels of language. It makes use of (mostly annotated) corpora and is applied to numerous tasks, including Information Retrieval, Sentiment Analysis, Machine Translation, and chatbots.


The programme for the course includes the following sessions:


Basic principles of ML and its role in linguistic research


Neural Networks 1: basics


Neural Networks 2: advanced models


Neural Networks 3: the present


Machines who think? The issue of meaning




Academic Writing

Matthew Binney


This course provides guidance on organizing essays for writing in English, specifically for presenting research at international conferences and submitting to journals. The one-week course focuses on three parts of writing academic papers: argument, organization, and style. The argument section of the course concentrates on being concise and clear when representing arguments, identifying a problem, outlining a literature review, distinguishing one’s solution or argument, and articulating the argument in an abstract. The organization section of the course concentrates on outlining parts of the introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. The style section of the course concentrates on skills and techniques for writing academic prose in English, including revising sentences for cohesion, concision, and fluidity. Additionally, the final, style section focuses on identifying differences in mechanics and spelling when submitting to English-language journals in North America and the British Isles.


This is a practical course, and, as such, hands-on. Sample research articles will be provided, and students are encouraged to bring their own in-process essays, particularly essays they would like to present at an international conference in English. We will workshop papers, as we refine our arguments, tighten our organization, and craft our style to provide the most effective presentation of our research.


The programme for the course includes the following sessions:





Human Rights: Philosophical and Historical Foundations 

Armen Marsoobian


The course will explore the philosophical origins of the concept of human rights as it is conceived today in the modern human rights environment including its incorporation into international human rights and humanitarian law. These origins will be first explored in important thinkers from the Enlightenment. The major ethical theories will be summarized and critiques of them explored. Important documents in the development of human rights law will be examined along with the historical moments that led to their creation. Concepts central to human rights such as autonomy, dignity, and agency will be explored. We will also explore connections and tensions between individual and group rights.




Language & Power

Lisa Hofmann


In this course, we examine how social relations of power can influence language use and interpretation, combining perspectives from linguistic pragmatics, empirical sociolinguistics, and social philosophy. We explore questions of standardization—who determines what constitutes "correct" and "good" language use—and how we negotiate the concepts used to talk about social categories. We will also think about how language users navigate social aspects of linguistic diversity.

To do this, we will discuss the linguistic basis of language diversity and ask how we form social attitudes about language varieties, and how social identities interact with ideas of (non-)standardness. We also explore how social identities manifest on a societal level, and the question of definitional power—who holds the authority to shape how we talk about people, groups of people, and relations between them? Finally, we address aspects of social meaning, examining how speakers implicitly convey aspects of their identities through language in various contexts, sometimes unintentionally and other times with specific goals.




Acquisition Theory and Cognitive science

Tom Roeper


Using language acquisition as a prism, we will look at how discovery procedures offer insight into the challenge of developing formalisms for cognitive science.  And then we will consider how far a thought-syntax equivalence can be defended (work by Chomsky, Hinzen, deVilliers, Sauerland).  Is propositionality realized first in a mental syntax, or first in language syntax, or implicitly in pragmatics, or simultaneously?  We will discuss how free will underlies the core processes  of syntax and acquisition.


Another topic will be current research on Speech Acts (exclamatives, performatives, suggestion questions) and how they interact with the Common Ground and a theory of minimal interfaces between  syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.  These questions are far from resolved and are intended to provoke lively discussion.


As background, ongoing experimental research on how children use and understand Propositional Attitude verbs (think, know, believe, decide, hope, wonder, etc) will be discussed and encouraged.  Students will be asked to explore databases in their own languages or in English for evidence of embedding like this sentence from a 6yr old: "I know you think I think Easter is 3 days long, but I told you it is just one day long".





Phonetics in Language Documentation: Modern Armenian Languages and Dialects

Armik Mirzayan


Language documentation concerns the systematic production of long-lasting records of the speech practices (i.e., languages and dialects) of a specific community. In this course we will focus on a few of the practical aspects of language documentation, with special attention to data (word and phrase) collection, transcription and measurements of phonetic details, and documentation of language-in-use. The specific language area focus of our course will be modern Armenian languages and dialects. However, the skills you develop in this class can be extended to your future fieldwork and/or language documentation in any area of the world.


Through this course students will (1) gain a basic understanding of the current practices in digital language documentation, (2) develop skills in phonetic and prosody-based transcriptions essential in documentation of regional linguistic/dialectal variation, (3) become familiar with some of the tools used in fieldwork, and (4) practice analyzing phonetic aspects of speech variation through acoustic analysis. By the end of the course, I hope that we will all be better prepared in conducting future language documentation projects which focus on data collection, linguistic transcription/annotation, acoustic-phonetic analyses, and presentation of research results to different audiences.




Natural Language Ontology

Friederike Moltmann


Ontology as part of philosophy concerns itself with the most general notions of being. Natural language ontology, which is part of both linguistics and philosophy, has as its subject matter the ontology that is implicit in natural language. That is, it concerns itself with the kinds of entities that play a role in the meaning of sentences, with the ontological categories that are reflected in the structure of language, notions such part and whole, existence, time and space, the abstract-concrete distinction. This course will give a general introduction to natural language ontology, and will deal in particular with the following topics:





Language Universals 

Masha Polinsky


This course is an introduction to the study of cross-linguistic variation with a special emphasis on morphology and syntax. We will examine noun-verb distinctions; universals of word order; structure of main clausal constituents, and clause types.

The course will include the following lectures (subject to change depending on course pace):




Introduction to Sign Language 

Valeria Vinogradova


This introductory course covers key topics in sign language studies. It discusses similarities and differences between signed and spoken languages and provides insights into how sign language research informs our understanding of human language ability. We will cover the fundamental structural properties of sign languages, as well as the theoretical, cultural, and social relevance of studying sign languages. After the course, the students will possess basic tools for engaging with descriptive and experimental research on sign languages. 


In addition to introducing the principal linguistic features of sign languages, the course will focus on issues of high applied importance, such as the status of sign languages, neural substrates, variation, acquisition, and bilingualism.




Theories of Reference

Daniel Molto



This course will examine a key topic in the philosophy of language: what do names mean? We will look at answers to this question that philosophers have offered over the past one hundred and fifty years. Why does a name pick out one thing rather than another? Do names work the same as other words in this respect? If the job of names is to pick out single things, why is it that they sometimes appear as plurals (eg 'all the Daniels in the room...')? 


We will see that debates about the meaning of names guided much of the development of analytic philosophy over the course of the twentieth century, and we will examine the relationship between the meanings of names and key metaphysical notions, like necessity, possibility and identity.




Discourse Pragmatics and Literature

Daniel Altshuler


In this course, we will learn a pragmatic theory of discourse interpretation called Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) developed by Nicholas Asher, Alex Lascarides and colleagues. The key insight of this theory is the idea that pragmatic interpretation is driven by principles of discourse coherence. We will see how this theory can lead to a better appreciation of literature and how literature can lead to a better understanding of discourse pragmatics.




Political Epistemology

Arshak Balayan


Political epistemology is a relatively new branch of applied philosophy which explores relations between politics and complex processes of (scientific) knowledge production, communication and application.  In this crash course we will explore the following 5 topics/issues:  


1.  Social and political dimensions of scientific knowledge.  

2.  Political ignorance:  Does it make democracy impractical? 

3.  Who are experts?  How to identify them and who to trust?   

4.  Political disagreement, echo chambers and polarization.

5.  What to do with fake news and disinformation?