Spring 2025 undergraduate courses

For a full list of undergraduate courses in linguistics offered in recent years, see: CAS – Linguistics Courses.

Say What? Accents, Dialects, and Society

CAS LX 110

Exploration of how variation in accents and dialects interacts with various aspects of society and human life. Students examine how dialect variation arises, how it can be described, and how it interacts with literature, film, humor, and music. Cannot be taken for credit by students who have previously taken, or are currently taking, CAS LX 250 or a higher-level linguistics course. (Students must also register for a discussion section.)

BU Hub areas: Social Inquiry I, The Individual in Community, Research and Information Literacy.

Introduction to Linguistics

CAS LX 250 / MET LX 250

Properties that languages share and how languages differ with respect to structure (sound system, word formation, syntax), expression of meaning, acquisition, variation, and change; cultural and artistic uses of language; comparison of oral, written, and signed languages. Also offered through Metropolitan College as MET LX 250. (Students must also register for a discussion section.)

BU Hub areas: Scientific Inquiry I, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Critical Thinking.

Syntax: Introduction to Sentential Structure

CAS LX 321

Systematic examination of how meaning is encoded in words and sentences, and how it can emerge from the complexity of the grammar. Also touches on various aspects of pragmatics–the study of how meaning is shaped by context.  (Students must also register for a discussion section, CAS LX 322.)

Prerequisite: CAS LX 250, or consent of instructor.

BU Hub areas: The Individual in Community, Global Citizenship and Intercultural Literacy, Critical Thinking.

Questions

CAS LX 328

Exploration of question formation across languages, and from several theoretical perspectives, integrating syntax, phonology, semantics, morphology, pragmatics, and philosophy in pursuit of a general understanding of one of the central phenomena in theoretical linguistics. Also offered as GRS LX 628.

Prerequisite: CAS LX 250, or consent of instructor.

Sociolinguistics

CAS LX 341

Introduction to language in its social context. Methodological and theoretical approaches to sociolinguistics. Linguistic variation in relation to situation, gender, socioeconomic class, linguistic context, and ethnicity. Integrating micro- and macro-analysis from conversation to societal language planning.

Prerequisite: CAS LX 250 or CAS AN 351, or consent of instructor.

Romance Linguistics

CAS LX 370

Covers morphophonological and morphosyntactic change since Latin, plus various topics in the comparative grammar of modern Romance languages. Students deepen their linguistic knowledge and analytic skills by applying what they have learned in other linguistics courses to this language family.

Prerequisite: CAS LX 250, and prior study of some Romance language at the 4th semester level or higher (e.g. CAS LF 212 or LI 212 or LP 212 or LS 212 or CL 212, or equivalent); or consent of instructor.

History of French

CAS LX 375

Overview of socio-historical and linguistic factors underpinning the emergence, development, and spread of the French language over time. Study of historical, societal, and political events, along with phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and orthographic changes. Representative texts demonstrate stages of language change. Conducted in English.

Prerequisite: CAS LX 250, or consent of instructor.

The Sounds of Spanish

CAS LX 383

Introduction to Spanish phonetics and phonology. Covers articulatory, acoustic, and auditory phonetics, focusing on techniques for visualizing speech sounds. Examines the phonemic inventory and phonological organization of Spanish from several perspectives, including generative and articulatory phonology as well as sociolinguistics. Conducted in Spanish.

Prerequisites: CAS LX 250 and one LS 300-level language course, or consent of instructor.

Phonological Analysis

CAS LX 403

Survey of phonological theory and analysis, with focus on cross-linguistic typology of phonological systems. Phonological reasoning and argumentation skills are developed. Empirical coverage includes contrast, distinctive features, rules and constraints, opacity, tone, syllabification, stress, and interactions with morphology and syntax.

Prerequisite: CAS LX 301, or consent of instructor.

Intermediate Semantics: The Grammatical Construction of Meaning

CAS LX 432

Systematic development of a semantic theory of natural language, using the tools of model-theoretic semantics. In-depth study of the relation between meaning and grammar, and the relation between meaning and context.

Prerequisite: CAS LX 331, or consent of instructor.

Computational Linguistics

CAS LX 496

Introduction to computational techniques to explore linguistic models and test empirical claims. Serves as an introduction to concepts, algorithms, data structures, and tool libraries. Topics include tagging and classification, parsing models, meaning representation, corpus creation, information extraction.

Prerequisite: CAS LX 250 and either CAS CS 112 or CS LX 394, or consent of instructor.

BU Hub areas: Quantitative Reasoning II, Research and Information Literacy.