Course Area: Linguistics

Course Description:

Recent developments in phonological theory embrace findings from cognitive linguistics, phonetics and 

connectionist modeling in language perception. A usage-based model of phonology challenges traditional notions 

well-established in phonological research and provides new ways of examining forgotten areas such as language 

variation. This course is a graduate-level class exploring such recent developments in phonological theory and its 

application in the study of sound change. The first part of the semester will be dedicated to understand the general 

ideas of the exemplar theory as proposed by Bybee (2001) and its implications for the study of language variation 

in sociolinguistics. The second part of the semester we will examine particular variation phenomena with the idea 

of implementing exemplar theory to explore and understand these language changes.