Credits: 4 (3-1-0)
Description
The discipline of Linguistics as we understand it today is based on the idea of investigating the formal/computational nature of linguistic processes in natural language. This course begins by tracing parallel developments in language and computation during the time of the cognitive revolution in the 50s. As language is learnt from infancy, we begin by introducing two approaches to learning: top-down and bottom-up. Further, we discuss language architectures that are both symbolic and non-symbolic in order to account for a fragment of English grammar: the past tense and nominalization. Following this, the course introduces some of the basic tools used by linguists in the analysis of language, while introducing concepts such as the syllable, morpheme, constituent structure etc.
During lab sessions, students will work on problem sets to familiarize themselves with the analytical tools in linguistics. They will get a chance to work on datasets in South Asian languages such as Malayalam and Hindi.