Introduction to Linguistics

This class provides some answers to basic questions about the nature of human language. Throughout the course, we examine a number of ways in which human language is a complex but law-governed mental system. Much of the class is devoted to studying some core aspects of this system in detail; we also spend individual classes discussing a number of other issues, including how language is acquired, how languages change over time, language endangerment, and others.

• Lecture 2: Morphology, Part 1
• Lecture 3: Morphology, Part 2
• Lecture 4: Morphology, Part 3
• Lecture 5: Phonetics, Part 1
• Lecture 6: Phonetics, Part 2
• Lecture 8: Phonology, Part 1
• Lecture 9: Phonology, Part 2
• Lecture 10: Phonology, Part 3
• Lecture 11: Syntax, Part 1
• Lecture 12: Syntax, Part 2
• Lecture 13: Syntax, Part 3
• Lecture 14: Syntax, Part 4
• Lecture 15: Syntax, Part 5
• Lecture 16: Syntax, Part 6
• Lecture 17: Syntax, Part 7, and Semantics, Part 1
• Lecture 18: Semantics, Part 2
• Lecture 19: Semantics, Part 3
• Lecture 20: Semantics, Part 4
• Lecture 21: Semantics, Part 5
• Lecture 22: Dialects
• Lecture 23: Historical Linguistics
• Lecture 24: Endangered Languages
• Lecture 25: Language Acquisition
• Lecture 26: Signed Languages