Undergraduate Courses in Linguistics
Department of Linguistics
UCLA
Not every class is offered every quarter. To see if a class meets in the current quarter, as well as the time and location, go to the Linguistics Department's Course Schedule page.
1. Introduction to Study of Language. (5) Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour. Summary, for general undergraduates, of what is known about human language; unique nature of human language, its structure, its universality, and its diversity; language in its social and cultural setting; language in relation to other aspects of human inquiry and knowledge. P/NP or letter grading.
2. Language in the
3. American Sign Language: Structure and Culture. (5) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL) not required. Introduction to principles of linguistics through study of structure of American Sign Language and culture of deaf Americans. Phonology, morphology, syntax of ASL, historical change, signed language universals, education, identity, and ASL literature. P/NP or letter grading.
M10. Structure of English Words. (5) (Formerly numbered 10.) (Same as Englsih M40.) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Introduction to structure of English words of classical origin, including most common base forms and rules by which alternate forms are derived. Students may expect to achieve substantial enrichment of their vocabulary while learning about etymology, semantic change, and abstract rules of English word formation.
20. Introduction to Linguistics . (5) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Introduction to theory and methods of linguistics: universal properties of human language; phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic structures and analysis; nature and form of grammar.
88A. Lower Division Seminar. (4) Seminar, three hours. Limited to freshmen/sophomores. Variable topics; consult Schedule of Classes, College of Letters and Science, or department for topics to be offered in a specific term. May be repeated for credit.
88B. Lower Division Seminar. (4) Seminar, three hours. Limited to freshmen/sophomores. Variable topics; consult Schedule of Classes, College of Letters and Science, or department for topics to be offered in a specific term. May be repeated for credit.
99. Special Studies in Linguistics. (2 to 4) Supervised research or training. May be repeated for credit. P/NP or letter grading.
103. Introduction to General Phonetics. (5) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Preparation: one prior linguistics course or course 20 concurrently. Phonetics of a variety of languages and phonetic phenomena that occur in languages of the world. Extensive practice in perception and production of such phenomena.
104. Experimental Phonetics. (5) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Requisite: course 103. Survey of principal techniques of experimental phonetics. Use of laboratory equipment for recording and measuring phonetic phenomena.
105. Morphology (5) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Enforced requisite: course 20. In linguistics, morphology is study of word structure. Morphological theory seeks to answer questions such as how should words and their component parts (roots, prefixes, suffixes, vowel changes) be classified crosslinguistically? how do speakers store, produce, and process complex words (words with affixes, compounds)? how do speakers know how to produce correct word forms even when they have not previously heard them and how do speakers know that particular words are well-formed or ill-formed? is there principled distinction in traditional division between inflection and derivation? how can we best account for variation in forms that are same (e.g., root in keep/kept even though vowels are different)? can we formulate crosslinguistic generalizations about word structure? P/NP or letter grading.
110. Introduction to Historical Linguistics. (5) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Requisites: courses 20, 103, 120A. Methods and theories appropriate to historical study of language, such as comparative method and method of internal reconstruction. Sound change, grammatical change, semantic change.
C111. Intonation. (4) Lecture, two hours; laboratory, two hours. Requisites: courses 20, 103, 120A or 120B. Recommended: course 104/204. Survey of intonational theory for English and other languages, with particular emphasis on phonological models of intonation. Laboratory equipment used for recording and analyzing intonation, and students learn to transcribe intonational elements. Concurrently scheduled with course C211.
114. American Indian Linguistics. (5) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Strongly recommended (but not prerequisite): course 20. Survey of genetic, areal, and typological classifications of American Indian languages; writing systems for American Indian languages; American Indian languages in social and historical context. One or more languages may be investigated in detail.
M115. Survey of African Languages. (4) (Same
as African Languages M190.) Requisite: course 20. Introduction to languages of
M116. Introduction to Japanese Linguistics. (4) (Same as Japanese M120.) Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour. Enforced requisite: Japanese 3 or Japanese placement test. Introduction to Japanese grammar and sociolinguistics through reading, discussion, and problem solving in phonology, syntax, semantics, and discourse pragmatics. Letter grading.
120A.
120B.
125. Semantics. (5) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Requisite: course 120B. Survey of most important theoretical and descriptive claims about the nature of meaning.
127. Syntactic Typology and Universals. (5) Requisite: course 20. Study of essential similarities and differences among languages in grammatical devices they use to signal the following kinds of concepts: relations between nouns and verbs (case and word order), negation, comparison, existence/location/possession, causation, interrogation, reflexivization, relativization, attribution (adjectives), time (tense and aspect), and backgrounding (subordination). Data from a range of languages presented and analyzed.
C128A. Romance Syntax: French. (4) Lecture, four hours. Preparation: some knowledge of French (or a Romance language). Requisite: course 120B. Course C128A is requisite to C128B. Aspects of structure of French language, with emphasis on properties of construction not found in English. Concurrently scheduled with course CM228A. P/NP or letter grading.
C128B. Romance Syntax: French. (4) Lecture, four hours. Preparation: some knowledge of French (or a Romance language). Requisites: courses 120B, C128A. Aspects of structure of French language, with emphasis on properties of construction not found in English. Concurrently scheduled with course CM228B. P/NP or letter grading.
C130. Language Development. (5) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Requisites: courses 20, 120A, 120B. Survey of research and theoretical perspectives in language development in children. Discussion and examination of child language data from English and other languages. Emphasis on universals of language development. Topics include infant speech perception and production, development of phonology, morphology, syntax, and word meaning. Concurrently scheduled with course C233.
C132. Language Processing. (5) Lecture, four hours; laboratory, one hour. Requisites: courses 20, 120A, 120B. Central issues in language comprehension and production, with emphasis on how theories in linguistics inform processing models. Topics include word understanding (with emphasis on spoken language), parsing, anaphora and inferencing, speech error models of sentence production, and computation of syntactic structure during production. Concurrently scheduled with course C232.
C135. Neurolinguistics. (5) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Requisites: courses 1 or 20, and C130. Examination of relationship between brain, language, and linguistic theory, with evidence presented from atypical language development and language disorders in the mature brain. Topics include methodologies to investigate normal and atypical hemispheric specialization for language and children and adults with acquired and/or congenital language disorders. Concurrently scheduled with course C235.
C140. Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition. (5) (Formerly numbered 140.) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Requisites: courses 120A, 120B, C130. Introduction to study of childhood bilingualism and adult and child second language (L2) acquisition, with focus on understanding nature of L2 grammar and grammatical processes underlying L2/bilingual acquisition. Discussion of neurolinguistic and social aspects of bilingualism. Concurrently scheduled with course C244. P/NP or letter grading.
M146. Language in Culture. (4) (Same as Anthropology M140.) Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour. Requisite: course 20 or Anthropology 33. Study of language as an aspect of culture; relation of habitual thought and behavior to language; and language and the classification of experience. Holistic approach to study of language, with emphasis on relationship of linguistic anthropology to fields of biological, cultural, and social anthropology, as well as archaeology. P/NP or letter grading.
M150. Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics. (5) (Same as Indo-European Studies M150.) Lecture, four hours. Recommended requisite: course 1 or 20. Indo-European languages (ancient and modern), including their relationships, chief characteristics, writing systems, and sociolinguistic contexts; nature of reconstructed Indo-European proto-language and proto-culture. One or more Indo-European languages may be investigated in detail. P/NP or letter grading.
160. Field Methods. (6) Discussion, four hours; individual or group sessions, one to two hours. Prerequisites: courses 103, 120A, 120B. Analysis of a language unknown to members of class from data elicited from a native speaker of the language.
165A. Phonology II. (5) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Requisite: course 120A (undergraduates with grade of A in course 120A may replace course 165A with 200A, with consent of instructor). Further study in phonological theory and analysis: autosegmental theory, syllable structure, metrical theory, interface of phonology and grammar.
165B. Syntax II. (5) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Requisite: course 120B. Recommended for students who plan to do graduate work in linguistics. Form of grammars, word formation, formal and substantive universals in syntax, relation between syntax and semantics.
170. Language and Society: Introduction to Sociolinguistics. (4) Requisite: course 20. Study of patterned covariation of language and society; social dialects and social styles in language; problems of multilingual societies.
175. Linguistic Change in English. (5) Requisites: courses 110, 120A, 120B. Principles of linguistic change as exemplified through detailed study of history of English pronunciation, lexicon, and syntax.
M176A. Structure of Japanese I . (4) (Same as Japanese CM122.) Lecture, three hours. Recommended preparation: two years of Japanese. Requisite: Japanese M120. Discussion of many seemingly idiosyncratic characteristics of Japanese syntax and semantics in light of word-order typology and universal grammar, often in form of a contrastive analysis of Japanese and English.
M176B. Structure of Japanese II. (4) (Same as Japanese CM123.) Lecture, three hours. Recommended preparation: two or more years of Japanese language study. Survey of Japanese language at three different levels of organization: (1) word level -- word class, verbal morphology and semantics; (2) clause/sentence level -- grammatical constructions; (3) discourse level -- point of view, ellipsis, topicalization.
M177. Structure of Korean. (4) (Same as Korean CM120.) Lecture, three hours. Recommended preparation: two years of Korean, or one year of Korean and some knowledge of linguistics. Discussion of major syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of Korean in light of linguistic universals, with brief introduction to formation, typological features, and phonological structure of Korean.
M178. Contrastive Analysis of Japanese and Korean. (4) (Same as Japanese CM127 and Korean CM127.) Lecture, three hours. Recommended preparation: two years of Japanese or Korean, one introductory linguistics course. Critical reading and discussion of selected current research papers in syntax, pragmatics, discourse, and sociolinguistics from perspective of contrastive study of Japanese and Korean. May be repeated for credit with consent of instructor.
C180. Mathematical Structures in
C185A.
C185B. Computational Linguistics II. (5) Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour. Requisite: course C185A/C209A or consent of instructor. Extensions of basic language processing techniques to natural language processing. Recent models of syntactic, semantic, and discourse analysis, with particular attention to their linguistic sophistication and psychological plausibility. Concurrently scheduled with course C209B.
195. Senior Essay. (4) Limited to senior linguistics majors. Extended piece of writing is undertaken on a linguistic topic selected by the student to be completed under supervision of a faculty member. Consult professor in charge to enroll.
196A. Honors Essay. (4) Prerequisites: 3.5 GPA, course 165A/200A or 165B/200B (may be taken concurrently). Recommended (but not required): completion of both courses 165A and 165B (or 200A and 200B) before or during term in which course 196A is taken. Draft of extended piece of writing on a linguistic topic selected by the student is prepared under supervision of a faculty member. Consult professor in charge to enroll. In Progress grading (credit to be given only on completion of course 196B).
196B. Honors Essay. (2) Prerequisite: course 196A. Piece of writing drafted in course 196A is presented in a seminar, revised, and put into final form under supervision of a faculty member. Consult professor in charge to enroll. 197. Special Topics in Linguistics . (4) Requisite: course 1 or 20. Variable topics selected from any undergraduate linguistics course area in which students desire greater in-depth knowledge. May be repeated for credit with topic change.
199. Special Studies in Linguistics. (2 to 4) Requisites: courses 120A, 120B. May be repeated for credit.
Last Updated: October 25, 2002