- Trainer*in: Kevin Tang
Quantitative Methods for Linguistic Data: An Introduction to Statistics using R (Prof. Tang, Winter 2022/2023, Monday: 10:30--12:00)
**Audience:**
Students would like to do any English Linguistic courses with a
quantitative component in the future. It can also be beneficial to those
who are more literature-based but would like to do more digital
humanities.
**Keywords: **
statistics, quantitative analysis, R, phonetics, phonology, language, linguistics
**Description:**
It
is as necessary to be numerate as it is to be literate, but students in
the field of humanities are often not as numerate as they are literate.
They will need to evaluate evidence that are based on probability-based
models or statistical results in many of the courses that they take in
university, as they consider the efficacy of vaccination and the
severity of the pandemic, as they begin to vote in local and national
elections, as they search for employment on the job market after
graduating, and so on. With an increasingly digital world filled with
big data, a command of statistical reasoning is more important than
ever. In this course, we will learn numeracy through linguistics,
specifically through phonetics and phonology by learning to analyse the
sounds of languages quantitatively.
How do we analyse the sounds
of languages quantitatively? This course, Analysing the sounds of
languages, covers the basics of quantitative methods using real data
taken from the field of phonetics and phonology. We will provide a
gentle introduction to the statistical program R (www.r-project.org) -- a
program that is used by data scientists in the tech. industry and
academic researchers. The course will consist of a combination of
lectures, and plenty of hands-on exercises. We introduce research
questions, such as “Do Southerners in the US really talk more slowly?”
or “Why do we expect scholarly words to be longer than familiar words?”
as a framework for introducing the numerical concepts required to answer
research questions such as these. In this course, statistical methods
are introduced with a research question and a solid understanding of the
data, which is why we use real data and questions that are relevant to
anyone who commands a spoken language. A good amount of space is also
devoted to illustrating how to formulate and answer a research question,
and hypothesis development and testing.
**Textbook:**
To get a
sense of what we will do on this course, do check out the main textbook
that we will be using https://kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/77848 (freely
available). I look forward to numerating with you on phonetics and
phonology.
Smith, Bridget J., Beckman, Mary E., and Foltz,
Anouschka (2016). Analyzing the sounds of languages. Ohio State
University. http://hdl.handle.net/1811/77848
- Trainer*in: Eoin O'Reilly
- Trainer*in: Kevin Tang
Introduction to Corpus Phonetics (Prof. Tang, Winter 2022/2023, Monday: 12:30--14:00)
This course aims to fill a gap between the students’ knowledge in phonetics and phonology and their ability to applying that knowledge to ask non-trival research questions using a large amount of speech and lexical data. It would cover corpus compilation, semi-automatic annotation (phonetic transcription and forced-alignment), extraction of phonetic and phonological variables and the basics of statistical analyses of corpus data. It complements other courses such as advanced phonetics, quantitative and experimental methods, and corpus/computational linguistics. The course will involve the use of programming languages (such as Python, R and unix commands) and they will be introduced as needed.
While we won’t be using a single textbook, we will likely sample from the following textbook: Harrington, J. (2010). Phonetic analysis of speech corpora. John Wiley & Sons.
- Trainer*in: Kevin Tang
Computational Modelling (Prof. Tang, Winter 2022/2023, Weds: 12:30--14:00)
**Audience:** Students who would like to improve their employability by
learning a highly desirable skill. Students who would like to do any
English Linguistic courses with a quantitative component in the future.
It can also be beneficial to those who are more literature-based but
would like to do more digital humanities. Students who are interested in
Artificial Intelligence.
**Keywords:**
computational linguistics, quantitative analysis, language, linguistics, text-processing
**Description:**
Natural
Language Processing plays a big role in our digital lives. We will
demystify some of these everyday tasks that involve natural language
processing: such as spelling and grammar correction, document
classification, dialogue systems, machine translation, and forensic
linguistics. On the practical side, we will focus on applying
off-the-shelf tools that are often used in computational modelling of
language data. Armed with these skills, you will be able to model
language data quantitatively and ask measurable research questions.
By
the end of the course, you will learn how to perform i) pre-processing
of text files (cleaning up raw text files), ii) automatic linguistic
annotation, such as Part of Speech tagging (automatically adding labels
such as Noun, Adjective to each word), Name Entity Recognition
(identifying proper names, time, date, places, events) and Sentiment
(fear, anger, happy, surprise…) iii) the basics of classifying
documents, authors and sentiment.
Students will get insight
into how these systems work (and why it is still so difficult to do
natural language processing well). We also consider social and ethical
considerations such as privacy, job creation and loss due to language
technologies, and the nature of consciousness and machine intelligence.
** Requirement:**
You should bring a laptop computer with you, fully charged for each class.
Note
that the practical side of this course focuses on using NLP tools (such
as https://spacy.io/usage/spacy-101). While it will involve using the
programming language Python, it will be introduced as and when needed.
**Textbook:**
Dickinson, M., Brew, C., & Meurers, D. (2012). Language and computers. John Wiley & Sons.
- Trainer*in: Eoin O'Reilly
Phonetics / Phonology (O'Reilly)
Important note: this course is not to be confused with the identically-named course taught in parallel by Prof. Tang. That course runs in parallel to this one, focusing more on phonology as opposed to this phonetics-oriented one, making it a good complement.
- recognise and transcribe the sounds of the world’s languages using the International Phonetic Alphabet.
- name and describe the main articulators involved in speech production.
- carry out independent phonetic analysis using PRAAT.
- recognise and understand regional and social differences in varieties of English.
- investigate the syllable structure, rhythm, stress, and metrical structure of a language
- Trainer*in: Lara Rüter
- Trainer*in: Kevin Tang
- Trainer*in: Julika Weber
Intermediate Phonetics/Phonology (Prof. Tang, Winter 2022/23, Wednesday: 10:30--12:00)
**Audience:** Students who would like to learn more about the structures
of phonetics and phonology. Students who would like to do more advanced
phonetics and phonology courses in the future.
** Note 1 **
Consider taking also Laboratory Phonology (Methode Module) by Dr.
Christopher Geissler in the same semester as it would complement this
course very well.
** Note 2 ** There is another phonetics/phonology
(Structure, intermediate module) course in the same semester taught by
Mr. Eoin O'Reilly.
**Keywords: **
phonetics, phonology, language, linguistics
**Description:**
This
course provides you with an elementary introduction to English
phonetics and phonology, designed for those who have no previous
knowledge whatsoever of the subject. It begins with a very elementary
introduction to articulatory phonetics, and then proceeds to introduce
the student to a very simplified account of some of the main aspects of
the phonological structure of present-day English. Languages other than
English will also be examined
to compare and contrast the linguistic structural differences and gain insights on linguistic generalisation.
Objectives
On completion of this course, you should be able to:
• Describe the articulatory processes involved in producing speech sounds of English and other languages.
• Gain a basic fluency with reading and writing the International Phonetic Alphabet
• Perform a phonemic analysis on phonetic data
• Identify similarities and differences among phonetic/phonological systems of a range of languages
•
Analyse data provided from natural languages to extract phonological
generalizations, and construct arguments from such data to support or to
weaken proposals for particular analyses
**Textbook:**
To get
a sense of what we will do on this course, do check out the main
textbook that we will be using
https://katalog.ulb.hhu.de/Record/990022276950206443 (Bruce Hayes
(2009). Introductory Phonology. Wiley-Blackwell. isbn: 1405184116). I
look forward to discovering phonetics and phonology with you.
Online resources for this textbook are available at http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/IP.