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CCTP-715-01 Language Change and Complexity Science
Spring only
When children develop their native language capacity, they acquire properties for which there is no evidence in the speech they encounter; these are so-called “emergent phenomena.” Furthermore, children sometimes acquire systems that are significantly different from those of their parents and the language undergoes rapid structural change, a “phase transition.” We can understand phase transitions through language acquisition by young children.
Emergent phenomena and phase transitions are key ideas in complexity science and they interest biologists dealing with the evolution of new species, physicists watching water turn to ice, and social scientists watching the sudden collapse of financial markets. Cross-science work on complex systems provides the context in which this course will study language acquisition and change.
We will consider the methods, successes and failures of 19th-century work on language change, which was the foundation for a new discipline of linguistics and of great interest to thinkers in evolutionary biology, beginning with Darwin, and early researchers in what we now call political science, including Marx. We will then move to language acquisition, arguments from the poverty of the stimulus and cue-based acquisition. We will investigate how historical change can be understood through children’s acquisition and how it enables us to understand the birth and death of languages more generally. This will involve a crucial distinction between external and internal languages and new methods for historical linguistics. Throughout the course we will see how linguistics is a lead science in understanding change and complex dynamics quite generally.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
Course syllabi
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Spring '10:
Lightfoot D
(description)
Additional syllabi may be available in prior academic years.
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