Theoretical Approaches to Multilingual Language Knowledge and Behavior

Catalog description

While most humans can be considered speakers of two or more languages, linguistic theory has for most of its history attempted to explain multilingualism as a special case, implicitly viewing monolingualism as more fundamental. In this course we explore a different perspective, namely that human language is fundamentally variable and multivalent, or in other words, multilingual. This orientation applies equally well to understanding how multiple languages are organized in the mind as to how multilinguals (understood here as users of more than one language) deploy their language knowledge, including language mixing phenomena. The focus of the course will vary (e.g., focusing on the mental representation of multiple languages in the mind, or on aspects of language behavior such as code switching), and students may repeat the course, provided the focus is different. Through readings of theoretical proposals and critiques of published work we will explore the implications of multilingualism for our understanding of the nature of human language at the most basic level. Students will develop their thinking through short essays, responses to published work, and in course projects designed to advance our theoretical understanding of language through both exploratory data analysis and hypothesis testing, probing the cutting edge of this topic and developing their abilities to ground their empirical work in well-developed theoretical reasoning.