The topic of the seminar is pragmatics. Pragmatics is the study of language use in different social contexts, and it raises many important questions about language use in different cultures, such as "How can I speak appropriately in a new language?", "How can I be polite (or impolite) when interacting with other speakers?", among many others. Speakers have a variety of ways of communicating their ideas in social interaction. Among many expressions and structures at their disposal, speakers choose particular ones based on the identity they want to project, the identity of their interlocutor(s), and the situation in which the interaction is taking place. Quite often, speakers also convey meaning in indirect ways. In this seminar, we will examine five broad domains: (1) pragmatic constructs and foundational theories, (2) common research methodologies and methods, (3) cross-cultural pragmatics, (4) pragmatics and technology, and (5) pragmatics in specific discourse domains (e.g., legal and medical discourse). Through critical examination of the literature in these three areas, we will refine your understanding of the role of pragmatics in (applied) linguistics research, and some of the common methods of data collection and analysis in this field.

The main goal of Introduction to Translation Studies is to introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of translation studies, the scholarly discipline that focuses on translation and interpreting research. A secondary goal is to guide participants in the design of their own research projects in an area of translation studies. The course consists of a survey component that reviews the main areas of translation studies and various issues in translation and applied linguistics, and of a more practical section that applies the concepts reviewed to the design of research projects and/or curriculum. Although there is a clear focus on those areas of translation studies relevant to applied linguistics and language acquisition, topics in literary and cultural studies will be reviewed (e.g. cultural studies, polysystems theories, etc.). Introduction to Translation Studies is aimed at students of linguistics, SLAT, literature, cultural studies, and related fields.

This course provides practical instruction in the methods used in sociolinguistic research and the theoretical background associated with specific approaches. Some of the topics include methods of sampling populations, participant-observation techniques, questionnaire design, sociolinguistics interviews, data transcription, quantification, and record-keeping strategies.

This course is an introduction to the study of Hispanic sociolinguistics from a variationist perspective. Main theoretical and methodological issues will be discussed based on examples drawn from studies of variation in Spanish. Our main focus will be on the role of Spanish in its social context as the basis for understanding issues central to observation, description, and explanation of linguistic variation and change across time. This approach allows for a close examination of the straight correlations between linguistic variation (phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical) and external constraints (pragmatic, social, and stylistic). Readings, exercises, and discussions will center on methods of data collection (e.g. sociolinguistic interview), variable rule analysis, and interpretation of quantitative and qualitative data.

This course presents an overview of sociolinguistic issues pertaining to the contact between languages in general and the contact between Spanish with other languages in particular. We will discuss basic concepts that emerge in this field of inquiry, such as diglossia, language maintenance, attrition, shift, convergence, code-switching, and borrowing, and apply these concepts to our discussion of contexts that involve Spanish. We will read about speech communities where Spanish is the majority language (in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America) and the minority language (in the United States). We will compare these situations and discuss how linguistic and extra-linguistic factors influence the output of contact, from both qualitative and quantitative viewpoints.

This course introduces the fundamental tools to conduct research in Spanish experimental phonetics and phonology. It introduces topics such as hypothesis testing and experimental design, data collection and analysis, and reproducibility and statistics. Students will be working on an original research project in Spanish phonetics while developing their command of quantitative research methods as used in this field. At the end of this course, students will be able to carry out quantitative research in phonetics independently.

This course serves as an introduction to the instrumental and experimental study of the sounds of Spanish, and it focuses on articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual phonetics. At the end of this course, students will be able to read and understand the primary literature on Spanish experimental phonetics as well as to conduct basic, descriptive research in this field.

The purpose of this course is to offer a overview of the research related to the interaction between syntax, informational content, and prosodic phonology that accounts for the differences in Spanish word order.

This course introduces students to innovations in syntactic theory that have been proposed within the last decade. Students will move beyond the introductory-text level and extend their knowledge of Principles & Parameters approaches to syntax through discussion of the goals of Minimalist Syntax and its hypotheses about design aspects of the human faculty of language. The course explores in detail how postulated minimalist primitives and operations interact to generate the (complex) structures that are characteristic of natural language sentences.

This course involves an examination of the methods and argumentation used in syntactic analysis, both from a general point of view and from the perspective of generative grammar. Emphasis is placed on analyzing language data, on constructing and evaluating syntactic argumentation, and on understanding the Principles & Parameters approach to the study of sentence structure. Secondarily, this course is also an introduction to scientific theorizing: what it means to construct a scientific theory, how to test a scientific theory, how to choose among competing theories. Linguistic data will be drawn from Spanish.