WiSe 2022/23

**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

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.

**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.

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

**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.