- Kristen Breitweiser, 911 family member and spokeswoman, arranged to have Ms. Edmonds address the media in a public press conference for the first time, right after Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified before the 911 Commission.
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Linguistics 5: Introduction to Language and Linguistics Autumn, 2013. The aim of this course is to introduce students to the main methods and results of linguistics, with an emphasis on their practical value in ordinary life. This course is a general survey of the field of linguistics.
Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics
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Rosenwald 224C
(773) 702-8522
Teaching at UChicago since 2018
Research Interests: Syntax, Syntax-Morphology Interface, Syntax-Semantics Interface
Dr. Erik Zyman's research is in theoretical syntax, and it’s driven by the following questions: (1) What principles, elementary operations, and atomic elements determine how lexical items can and can’t be combined to form larger syntactic units? (2) Which of those are universal, which vary crosslinguistically, and why? (3) What are their cognitive (and other) underpinnings? Erik is interested in many syntactic processes and phenomena: (External and Internal) Merge, constituency, selection, projection, adjunction, phases and (anti)locality, clause structure and functional sequences, “wordhood” and (anti)mirror effects, and more. In short, he seeks to characterize the elementary operations that build syntactic structures and to determine why they have the properties they do. His research languages have included English, Latin, and P’urhepecha, among others.
Recent Publications
Selected Articles/Chapters:
- Zyman, Erik. In production. “In Situ Mixed Wh-Coordination and the Argument/Adjunct Distinction.” Glossa.
- Zyman, Erik, and Nick Kalivoda. 2020. “XP- and X⁰-movement in the Latin Verb: Evidence from Mirroring and Anti-Mirroring.” Glossa.
- Zyman, Erik. 2018. “Quantifier Float as Stranding: Evidence from Janitzio P’urhepecha.” Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 36:991-1034.
- Zyman, Erik. 2018. “Gestures and Nonlinguistic Objects Are Subject to the Case Filter.” Snippets 32:6-8.
- Zyman, Erik. 2018. “Interjections Select and Project.” Snippets 32:9-11.
- Zyman, Erik. 2018. “Super-Local Remove in Nominal Preposing Around ‘Though.’ ” Snippets 33:13-15.
- Zyman, Erik. 2017. “P’urhepecha Hyperraising to Object: An Argument for Purely Altruistic Movement.” Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, Vol. 2. Ed. Patrick Farrell. 53:1-15.
2019-2020 Course Offerings
Seminar: Syntax (LING 46000) - Autumn 2019
This course is an advanced graduate seminar in syntax. Through readings from the primary research literature, we will investigate the nature, properties, and precise formulation of some of the elementary (and perhaps some not-so-elementary) operations that build the syntactic structures of human language.
2020-2021 Course Offerings
Syntax 1 (LING 30201) - Autumn 2020
This course is an advanced survey of topics in graduate syntax examining current syntactic theory through detailed analysis of a range of phenomena and readings from the primary research literature.
Seminar: Syntax (LING 46000) - Winter 2021
Seminar on topics related to syntax; topic TBD.
Advanced Syntax (LING 20202) - Spring 2021
Course Description: TBD.
This assignment assumes understanding of the lecture on Approaches to the study of language.
Below you will find a list of lins to recent papers and news or feature stories. Even though you may not be able to understand everything in these articles, you should be able figure out enough in order to answer the questions below.
Art studio pro 2 3 16 mm. First, classify each item according to the level(s) of linguistic analysis that are most clearly involved: (one or more of) phonetics, phonology, morphology, lexicon,syntax, semantics, or pragmatics. A reasonable answer is sometimes something like 'this paper deals primarily with morphology while discussing influences from phonology and semantics,' or 'as a discussion of linguistic nationalism, this paper deals implicitly with all levels of linguistic analysis.' In each case, give a brief (one or two sentence) explanation of your reasoning, so that we can give you as much credit as possible even if we disagree with your conclusion.
Then, classify the same list of titles according to their connections to topics external to language (if any), or the aims of the study. This is an open-ended list including theoretical linguistics, descriptive linguistics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, computational linguistics, neurolinguistics, linguistic typology, anthropological linguistics, biology of language, forensic linguistics, stylistics. You can also choose other categories that you find in the readings or the course lecture notes. Again, there will often be more than one answer, and you should give a brief explanation to help us understand your reasoning and give you as much credit as possible.
If you want, you can look at the similar set of questions and answers from an earlier year.
Linguist 1 911 Dispatcher
Typically, the title and abstract will contain words you don't know. If understanding a particular technical term seems essential to figuring out how to answer the questions, try searching for the word (perhaps in association with other related words from the text) on Google or Wikipedia, or using resources such as SIL's Glossary of Linguistic Terms.
If after a modest but reasonable effort you still find a case puzzling, make your best guess and bring your questions up in recitation.
You should not be surprised to find yourself puzzled, since the correspondence between classificatory taxonomies and the real world is often fuzzy. So the point of the exercise is to show that you understand the taxonomy and also (to the extent that you can at this point) that you understand what the various articles are trying to do.
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Remember that you do not need to read the whole article. Occasionally, you can answer the questions based only on the title. Sometimes the abstract is enough. Sometimes you'll need to skim (some parts of) the full text of the article. We understand that in the first week of what may be your first linguistics course, you can't be expected to fully analyze complex technical articles written by specialists for an audience of specialists.
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[ Some of the hyperlinks may not work from locations outside of Penn's network. If this happens to you, please let me know and I'll fix the link. ].
Linguist 1 911 Pilot
List of Texts:
(1) | 'The Origins and Evolution of the Cleveland Accent' |
(2) | 'Variation in Information Structure with Special Reference to Africa' |
(3) | 'The evolution of medial /t/ over real and remembered time' |
(4) | 'The Singlish Language Reflects the Power of My People' |
(5) | 'Ancestry-constrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis' |
(6) | 'Split intransitivity in English' |
(7) | 'Voler + infinitive in Catalan: From the imminence aspectual periphrasis to the epistemic and evidential marker' |
(8) | 'Gradient perception of children’s productions of /s/ and /θ/: A comparative study of rating methods' |
(9) | 'Parsing Linear Context-Free Rewriting Systems with Fast Matrix Multiplication' |
(10) | 'Automatic sentence stress feedback for non-native English learners' |
(11) | 'Error and Expectation in Language Learning: The Curious Absence of Mouses in Adult Speech' |
(12) | 'Long-Range Prosody Prediction and Rhythm' |
(13) | 'Canadian raising with language-specific weighted constraints' |
(14) | 'Computers Can Sense Sarcasm? Yeah, Right' |
(15) | 'Donald Trump's accent, explained' |
(16) | 'Commonsense Reasoning ~ Winograd Schema Challenge' |
(17) | 'Subjects in Acehnese and the Nature of the Passive' |
(18) | 'Towards Automatic Detection of Narrative Structure' |
(19) | 'Maxent grammars for the metrics of Shakespeare and Milton' |
(20) | '(r) we there yet? The change to rhoticity in New York City English' |