General Education Requirements
Not currently certified for a requirement. Courses are typically considered for Ways certification a quarter in advance.
Course Description
Human language affords an infinity of possible utterances. To know a language is not to know a finite list of memorized sentences—instead, not only can you produce and understand sentences never uttered before, but given any sentence you can always create a longer one. Yet, remarkably, the cognitive mechanisms that underlie this creativity are instantiated in a finite human brain.
This course explores the nature of the human capacity for language and how it allows boundless creativity to emerge from limited resources. Questions we will be asking include: What is the knowledge that one possesses—for the most part, tacitly—when we say they speak a particular language (like ASL, English, Navajo, or Zulu)? What is the language capacity like such that a human child can acquire any particular language that they are exposed to? How does language develop in the individual, and how might it have developed in the species? Along the way, we will uncover the rich hidden structure of words and sentences, and explore how that structure both varies systematically and remains surprisingly uniform across the world’s languages. We will also make headway on another deep mystery: if there is only one human capacity for language, part of the biological endowment of the species, why are there so many—apparently, staggeringly diverse—individual languages?
This course will teach you how to approach language as an object of scientific study, introducing you to central concepts, methods, and results in linguistics. Throughout the course you will analyze a wide variety of language data and will learn how to construct scientific hypotheses and test them empirically. A major component of the course will be the collective, hands-on construction of formal models (i.e., theories) of individuals’ knowledge of their language. The course is Socratically taught and, while there will be occasional readings, there is no textbook.
There are no prerequisites and no experience with linguistics will be assumed. This course is designed for anyone with an interest in language, linguistics, and/or cognitive science, as well as neighboring fields such as psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and philosophy.
Meet the Instructor: Boris Harizanov
“I am an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and have been at Stanford since 2014. A major focus of my research is the mechanisms that shape the structure of linguistic expressions (such as words and sentences) and the building blocks that these mechanisms manipulate. I am interested both in the nature of the human capacity for language in general and in how it yields the diversity of individual languages that we find in the world.”
