Summer School Schedule
SCCC Summer School Schedule
Location: The venue of SCCC Summer School will be the E building of Ilia University. (Room E 117)
Classes
Sept 3-7
Phonology 9:30-11:15
Acquisition 11:30-13:15
lunch break 13:15-14:30
Syntax 14:30-16:15
Semantics 16:30-18:15
Office hours
Wednesday Thursday Friday
Aravind 18:30-19:30 18:30-19:30
Faust 18:30-19:30 18:30-19:30
Nash/Polinsky 18:30-19:30 18:30-19:30
van Dooren 18:30-19:30 18:30-19:30
Travel and Accommodation:
Getting to Tbilisi By plane
If you arrive to Tbilisi international airport you can get to the city centre by bus, train or taxi:
Bus #37 connects the airport with the city centre.
Train to Station Square (sadguris moedani), where you can connect with city buses, metro, and minibuses.
Schedule:
Airport – to Station Square: 8:35 AM
Airport – to Station Square: 5:40 PM
Taxis are located in front of the Airport. Taxi service works 24/7.
Accommodation
There are several options for accommodation in Tbilisi. You can find hotels, hostels and apartments at reasonable price in the neighbourhoods of Vake, where the venue is located.
Semantics
Annemarie van Dooren: Semantics
This is an introduction to formal semantics, where the techniques of logic are used to describe how the meanings of sentences depend on their parts. We will train in the tools and techniques of semantic theory that are necessary to enter the field, and we will dive into the formal system of Heim & Kratzer 1998. Phenomena to be discussed include predication, quantification, and tense, aspect and modality. Time provided, we can explore language use (pragmatics) and the challenges for language learners from a semantics perspective (acquisition).
Athulya Aravind: First Language Acquisition
Athulya Aravind: First Language Acquisition
This course focuses on the process by which native speakers of a language acquire the ability to speak and understand that language. We will cover some of the major results in the study of first-language acquisition, concentrating on morpho-syntax, semantics and pragmatics. The findings primarily come from English, but cross-linguistic differences in the phenomena of interest and corresponding differences in acquisition patterns are also discussed. Throughout, we will locate the developmental findings within a broader set of issues about learning/learnability: What is the initial state of grammatical knowledge? What, if any, are intermediate states? What evidence do children need to proceed through stages, and what learning algorithms do they use to make sense of this evidence?
You can find slides and readings on the website.
When you click on the link there for SCCC, you will be prompted for a password. The password is ‘babytalk’.
Introduction to Syntax
Léa Nash and Maria Polinsky: Introduction to Syntax
How do people put words into sentences? How does a naïve speaker of a language know what is right and what is wrong in their language? These are core questions that syntacticians seek to answer. This course presents the basic concepts of modern syntactic theory and focuses on the construction of a rigorous model of sentence structure. The main emphasis in this course is on giving the students skills needed to do syntax on their own. You will learn terminology, facts, and the machinery required for a particular theory of syntax, but more importantly, you will be introduced to syntactic argumentation and the basics of theory construction. The empirical data used in the course come primarily from English, but we will also bring in data from Georgian and other languages.
Phonetics and Phonology
Noam Faust: Phonetics and Phonology (from the point of view of allomorphy)
This course will be about alternations in form and what speakers know about them. We will aim to distinguih between purely automtic alternations, which are phonetic or phonological in nature, and cases of phonologically-conditioned allomorphy, which involve two lexical representations and the selection of one of them. We will examine phenomena that have been claimed to illustrate real allomorphy and alternative accounts to the contrary. This investigation will take us from the basic generative assumptions about storage and production, through different takes on the division of labor between phonology and morphology, and to a set of cutting-edge questions yet to have been resolved. One such question will accompany us throughout the course: is phonologically-conditioned allomorph-selection performed by the same module that is responsible for phonological computation? What are the alternatives?