Linguistics 101H: Introduction to Linguistics (Honors)
UNC-Chapel Hill Linguistics
Fall 2025
Elliott Moreton
Week 17, 2025.12.12.Fr: FINAL EXAM, 4-7 p.m.
Week 16, 2025.12.02.Tu
Week 15, 2025.11.25.Tu
Week 14, 2025.11.19.Th
Week 14, 2025.11.17.Tu
Week 13, 2025.11.13.Th
Week 13, 2025.11.11.Tu
Week 12, 2025.11.06.Th
MIDTERM 2
- Will start once everyone has put away books, papers, phones, etc.
- Will end at 12:05.
- Please write your TA's name and section time on the first page!
- The HONOR CODE is in effect and the instructors will be
vigilant.
Assignment for 11/11 Tu:
- Read O'Grady et al., Ch. 13, introduction and Sections 2 and 3,
on geographical dialects and change over time;
- Ch. 8, introduction and Sections 3 and 4 on morphological and
syntactic change.
- HW: Ch. 13, Ex. 3; Ch. 8, Ex. 10, Ex. 11 i, iv, v
Week 12, 2025.11.04.Tu
Topics: Overregularization as evidence for grammar induction.
Critical (sensitive) periods.
Class:
- HO: Overregularization
- HO: Critical periods (aka "sensitive periods"), in language and elsewhere.
The effects of filial imprinting
can be seen
here.
Reminder: Midterm 2 is next time (11/06 Th)!
Week 11, 2025.10.30.Th
Topics: Grammar induction by children in first-language acquisition.
Class:
- Acquisition by induction
- Main stages in learning to talk (audio examples
here):
- cooing (1-4 months)
- canoncial babbling (5-10 months)
- first words (10-15 months)
- two-word utterances (18-24 months)
- Phones and syllables acquired in increasing order of complexity.
Adult targets are "repaired" to fit child's system. (Like loanword
adaptation.)
- HO: "Child phonology" (Sakai). Evidence for rules:
- Phonologically systematic (uses natural classes, etc.)
- "Across-the-board" changes
Reminder: Midterm 2 is 11/06 Th.
Assignment:
- For 11/04 Tu: O'Grady et al. 2017,
Ch. 9, Exercises 1, 2, 3. This HW will be graded only on whether
or not you actually did it.
- For 11/04 Tu: Read over the Midterm 2 syllabus (on Sakai) and
come prepared to ask questions.
- For 11/04 Tu (i.e., as usual): Read O'Grady et al. 2017, Ch. 9,
Section 4, on acquisition of morphology, and
Sections 5 and 6, on the acquisition of syntax and what makes
acquisition possible at all.
Week 11, 2025.10.28.Tu
Topics: Induction, inductive bias, and language acquisition.
Class:
- We've seen what gets into your head when you learn a language:
phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. But how
does it get there?
- HO: "Inductive inference and language learning" (Sakai)
- Inductive inference: Learning to recognize edible mushrooms
- What is the relation to language learning?
- Inductive bias in word learning
- Inductive bias in grammar learning
- Open questions about inductive bias in language
Week 10, 2025.10.23.Th
Topics: Sentential meaning. Compositional semantics.
Class:
- Sentential meaning. Distinction from reading between
- Extension (truth value in real world)
- Intension (truth conditions)
- Compositionality of semantics (HO, using extensional
meaning)
- Discuss last part of HW due Monday Oct. 14th.
Assignment for Tuesday, Oct. 28: Read O'Grady et al. Ch. 9,
through end of Section 4 (methods for studying first-language acquisition;
acquisition of phonology, vocabulary, and morphology). There is no
written assignment for Monday.
Week 10, 2025.10.21.Tu
Topics: Lexical and phrasal meaning.
Class:
- Knowledge of meaning vs. knowledge of truth
- Meaning of simple predicates like red, mammal,
etc.; distinction from reading between
- Extension (set membership in real world)
- Intension (conditions for belonging to set)
- Example: the Lieutenant Governor of Colorado
- Modelling intension. Two main ways to do it:
- Semantic features (like phonetic features)
- Similarity to category prototypes
- Discuss first part of HW due today.
Announcement: Midterm 2 will be on 11/06 (Tu)
Week 9, 2025.10.14.Tu
Topics: Movement and parametric variation.
Class:
- Some ways for languages to differ syntactically:
- Different functions or meanings expressed by
different categories (e.g, A instead of V)
- Different Merge process (e.g., complements follow vs.
precede heads)
- Different Move process (e.g., different things trigger
movement, different positions moved between)
- Example: Japanese phrase structure (handout)
- Reminder: English Y/N question formation ("inversion"):
T moves to C if C is "+Q" and empty. Evidence:
- He asked whether we would return.
- *He asked whether would we return.
- *He asked we would return.
- (He asked would we return.)
- do-support (not in book)
- Example: Verb raising in French (handout)
Assignment for 10/21 Tu:
- Read O'Grady et al. Chapter 6 through the end of Section 1, and
Chapter 6, Section 3, through the end of Subsection 3.2.
- Do Ch. 5 (not 6!), Ex. 10 ce, Ex. 11 be, Ex. 12
Week 8, 2025.10.09.Th
Topics: Syntactic movement.
Class:
- Discussion of HW 07.
- Discuss clausal complements and CP in connection with HW.
- CP fits X-bar schema (head/complement/specifier)
- Recursion and embedding
- Move; deep vs. surface structure.
- HO: "Evidence for movement" (Sakai)
Assignment for 10/14 Tu: Read O'Grady et
al. Ch. 5, Section 4, on differences in syntax between languages.
Week 7, 2025.10.02.Th
Topics: X-bar theory: heads, complements, specifiers,
and modifiers.
Class:
- Goal: Model of syntactic abilities, accounting for spontaneous
production and grammaticality judgments.
- Need: Account of nested constituent structure.
- Solution: X-bar theory. (WARNING: We will be working with a
highly simplified version of the real theory.)
- X-bar schema: The basics
- Heads (X = N, V, A, P, T, C, ...)
- Complements (sibling to head)
- Specifiers (child of XP)
- Apply to examples from HW 06
- See Appendix to Ch. 5, p. 207, for help with drawing tree structures.
- Evidence for basic X-bar structure (HO)
- Constituency tests (one, do so, etc., from last time)
- Selectional restrictions ("subcategorization"):
e.g., verbs like sleep, lack, pride, etc.
- Intrusion of modifiers (*bottle in the fridge of beer)
Assignment for 10/09 Th:
- Read O'Grady et al., Ch. 5, Sections 2 and 3, on
complements and movement.
- HW 07: Do Exercises 5a-j, 9ac.
Week 7, 2025.09.30.Tu
Topics: Internal structure of sentences (syntactic constituency).
Class:
- Go over Midterm 1
- Start syntax unit. Goal: Model of syntactic abilities.
- Data it's meant to explain: Grammaticality judgments.
(HO illustrating "ungrammatical") and natural production.
- Crucially dependent on internal structure of sentences ("constituency")
- Some tests for constituency in English (use with care)
- Substitution with pronoun, etc.
- Movement (various kinds)
- Coordination
- Deletion (not in O'Grady et al.)
- Examples from Constituency handout
Week 6, 2025.09.25.Th
MIDTERM 1
Assignment for 9/30 Tu:
- Read O'Grady et al. Ch. 5 Section 1 (includes re-reading of 1.1),
and the Appendix to Ch. 5 on "Building Tree Structures"
- HW 06: O'Grady et al. Ch. 5, Exercises 2ace, 4efgh. (Exercise 4 is
about material that is in the reading, but that we have not yet covered
in lecture or section. It should be doable anyway.)
Week 6, 2025.09.23.Tu
Topics: Allomorphy and morphophonemics.
Abstractness of underlying representations.
Class:
- Florentine Italian stop/fricative allophony
- Morpheme pronunciation "alternates" depending on
environment
- => Allophony rule is productive
- Only one underlying (here = phonemic)
representation needed for each morpheme
- Russian final-consonant alternations:
- Neutralization, a morphophonological (not allophonic)
rule.
- Still need only one underlying representation for
each morpheme
- Point: The underlying representation has to contain all
of the unpredictable information needed to predict the
surface forms.
- Questions re midterm?
Week 5, 2025.09.18.Th
Topics: Internal structure of words.
Class:
- Internal morphological structure of words and compositional
semantics (HO)
- Derivation vs. inflection; derivation vs. compounding (HO)
- Compounds; endo- vs. exocentricity.
- Midterm 1 syllabus (HO)
- Return HW 04, Tohono O'o'dham palatalization, with
comments and in-class problem (HO).
Reminder: The first midterm will be in a week, on Thursday
the 25th.
Assignment:
- Read O'Grady et al. Ch. 4, Section 6 (morphophonemics) and
Chapter 3, p. 110, "Hints for solving advanced phonology problems".
This is a very short reading assignment that will prepare us for
in-class problems next time.
- Look over Midterm 1 syllabus and bring questions next
time.
Week 5, 2025.09.16.Tu
Topics: Morphemes, and how to identify them. Words and lexical categories.
Class:
- Revisit the "Language in a nutshell" handout: Morphemes
as minimal units of sound-meaning correspondence
- Discuss HW 5, Swahili verb morphology, with "Postscript" handout
- Properties of morphemes:
- Lexical vs. grammatical ("functional"); open vs. closed classes
- Free vs. bound
- Roots vs. affixes
- Productivity
- ICP: Exercise 1, p. 154. For each proposed bound morpheme, prove it
by citing other words which share that sound and meaning: "spiteful",
"preplan", "delight"
- Lexical categories (N, V, Adj, etc.). Morphosyntactic tests for
category membership (handout).
- What is a "word"? (handout)
Assignment:
- For 9/18 Th: Read O'Grady et al. Chapter 4,
Sections 3 and 4, on inflection, derivation, and
compounding.
Week 4, 2025.09.11.Th
Topics: Knowledge of language, language
universals, Universal Grammar, and other issues raised by
Berent et al. 2008. Start morphology.
Class:
- Berent et al. 2008 discussion
- Linguistic universals
- Universal vs. language-particular knowledge
- Innate vs. acquired knowledge
- Sonority, and cluster phonotactics
- Perceptual effects of L1 phonotactics
- Why Korean?
- Predictions and experiments
- Conclusions
- Begin HW 5 (Swahili verbs)
Assignment for Tuesday, September 16:
- Reading (it will make more sense if you do it in this order):
- O'Grady et al. Ch. 4 through the end of Table 4.1
on p. 123, then the Appendix to Ch. 4 on pp. 153--154.
This will explain what morphemes are and how to
recognize them.
- O'Grady et al. Ch. 5, Section 1.1,, on pp. 169--172,
which will explain lexical categories (noun, verb, etc.)
and how to recognize them.
- O'Grady et al. Ch. 4, from where you left off right
after Table 4.1 on p. 123 through the end of Section 2
on p. 134. This will demonstrate some of the main kinds
of morpheme.
- Do HW 5 (Swahili verb morphology)
Week 4, 2025.09.09.Tu
Topics: Syllables, syllabification, and syllable-based phonotactics.
Class:
- Start Zoom.
- Go over HW 4, Tohono O'o'dham, with discussion
handout.
- Syllables and syllabification, illustrated with English expletive infixation (handout).
- Time permitting: In-class problem on English-to-Maori loanword adaptation (handout).
Assignment for Thursday, September 11
- Read Berent et al. 2008, with reading guide (handout), and come
prepared to discuss it.
- (It may help to re-read the Pinker 1994 chapter that we
read at the beginning of the semester as well.)
Announcement: Midterm 1 will be on Thursday, September 25.
Week 3, 2025.09.04.Th
Topics: Phonological rules. "Natural classes" of sounds.
Class:
- UNDERLING announcement
- Comments on HW 3, US vs. NZ vowels
- In-class problems from the O'Grady et al. book: Mokilese and Hindi (p. 112).
- Discuss Ganda liquids problem.
- Handout on "Allophony and natural classes"
- Includes discussion of in-class problems on Mokilese (Exercise 3, p. 112) and Ganda liquids (handout, 09/02)
- Lexicon/grammar distinction (= unpredictable/predictable).
- Formulating allophony rules. Importance of natural classes.
- Start in-class problem on Southern Glide Weakening (will finish next time)
Assignment for Tuesday, September 9:
- HW 4, Tohono O'o'dham
- Read O'Grady et al. 2017, Ch. 3, Section 2, on
syllables and sonority. This is preparation for a
research paper that we will read next week.
Week 3, 2025.09.02.Tu
Topics: Contrast and allophony; phonemes and allophones.
Class:
- Return HW 2 (phonetics exercises from O'Grady et al. 2017), with comments (handout)
- Go over HW 3 (vowels in NZ vs. US English)
- Check transcriptions.
- Differences between the two dialects.
- IPA details: schwa vs. wedge.
Conventions for writing English diphthongs.
- Is one of the two pronunciations (NZ or US) "more correct"?
- Handout on phonological contrast
- English and Albanian [l] vs. [ɫ] (audio from Omniglot)
- Ewe [b] vs. [β] (audio from UCLA
Ladefoged archive)
- Spanish [b] vs. [β] (audio from UNC faculty, Smith/Mora-Marin)
- In-class problem: Mokilese (Ch. 3, Exercise 3, p. 112).
Use of T-diagrams for finding conditioning
environments.
- Audio demonstration
of lexical tone (UCLA, Ladefoged). Contrastive or allophonic?
- Start in-class problem: Ganda liquids
Assignment for 9/4 (Th):
- Read O'Grady et al. 2017, Ch. 3, Section 4, on phonological rules.
- Finish the Ganda liquids problem; will be discussed in class on Thursday.
Week 2, 2025.08.28.Th
Topics: Consonant manner of articulation. Vowel articulation and IPA symbols.
Class:
- Finish last time's handout on consonants: manner of
articulation.
- Go over HW 2 (place, manner; IPA symbols)
- Vowel parameters: height, backness, rounding
(handout).
- Time permitting: Practice comparing vowel pairs (Ibibio, Zapotec,
Hasselt German)
- IPA symbols for English vowels and diphthongs. We'll stick to the
book's conventions (e.g., [aj], not [aI] or [ai]).
- In-class practice: Begin HW 3
Assignment for Tuesday, Sept. 2:
- Do HW 3, on U.S. and N.Z. English. The N.Z. English sound files are on Canvas,
under "Assignments". You can listen to them by clicking, or, if you're feeling
adventurous, you can install Praat
using these instructions on Jen Smith's web page.
- Read O'Grady et al. Ch. 2, Section 8, on suprasegmentals (tone, stress, length).
Examples can be heard
here
(UCLA)
- Read O'Grady et al. Ch. 3, through end of Section 1, on phonology.
Week 2, 2025.08.26.Tu
Topics: Speech as SOUNDS NOT LETTERS. IPA; what it's for and
how it works. Overview of vocal-tract anatomy. Consonant articulations.
Class:
- Comments on HW 01 (handout).
- Speech as SOUNDS NOT LETTERS! (Handout)
- IPA charts
- Three main parameters for consonants: Voicing (etc.), place of
articulation, manner of articulation (handout).
- Some low-tech ways to
observe your
articulators
- Using parametric description to generalize to non-English sounds
- What do
these informal descriptions really mean, in precise phonetic terms?
Assignment for Thursday, August 28:
- Read O'Grady et al. Ch. 2, Sections 5--7 on consonant
manner of articulation and on vowels
- HW 2: O'Grady et al. Ch. 2, Exercises 5, 6, 7, and 9. Try to describe each
group so as to exclude all of the other English sounds.
- Bring mirrors again
Week 1, 2025.08.21.Th
Topics: Structure of language. Mental grammar and descriptive
grammar. The lexicon. Language as an instinct.
Class:
- Start Zoom.
- Mental vs. descriptive grammar.
- Structure of language:
- (Mental) grammar, including phonetics, phonology,
morphology, syntax, semantics
(Mental) lexicon
Examples from your (descriptive) grammars.
Conclusions about
- How languages differ
- How they don't differ
Handout: "Language in a nutshell"
Pinker and O'Grady readings:
- Productivity (creativity) -- What is it? How possible? (Chomsky)
- Talking vs. brewing, baking, and writing (Darwin)?
- Language "not a cultural artifact" (Pinker)?
- Handout: "Instinct, technology, and cultural evolution"
- Universal Grammar (Chomsky)?
Assignment for Tuesday, August 26:
- Read O'Grady et al. 2005, Ch. 2, Sections 1-4, on speech sounds.
- Bring a hand mirror to class (all next week).
Week 1, 2025.08.19.Tu
Topics: Course organization. What is linguistics?
Class:
- Start Zoom.
- Course organization
- Read script on
preparedness in the classroom.
- An example of linguistics: English tag questions (slides, Canvas)
- Course preview
- Go over HW 01 (handout)
- Trip to Davis Library to look at grammar books.
Assignment for 8/21 (Th):
- Read Pinker 1994, Ch. 1 (HO)
- Read O'Grady et al 2017, Ch 1.
- From Davis Library, borrow a descriptive grammar of a
language you have never heard of (it should have a title
like A Grammar of ... -- the PL and PM sections
abound in these). Use it to do HW 1 (HO).