Courses offered in 2025-2026

FALL 2025

Linguistics 9501 - Graduate research seminar 1 (for 1st year MA students)
Linguistics 9500 - Graduate research seminar 2 (for 2nd year MA students)

Friday, 11:00AM - 12:30PM
University College room 2120
Prof. Jacques Lamarche

As part of your training in linguistics, you will develop valuable transferrable skills that can be effectively applied in a wide range of job settings. This course aims to help students identify and strengthen their marketable skills and learn to present themselves effectively to prospective employers both within and outside of academia. These skills include time management, oral communication, grant writing, teaching, leadership, research, project management, editing, interpersonal skills, and an appreciation of ethical and civic responsibility.

Linguistics 9600 - Generative Syntax: Valency in syntax and semantics

Wednesday, 9:30AM - 12:30PM
University College room 2120
Prof. Jacques Lamarche

The empirical issue discussed in this course pertains to the relation between syntactic patterns of verbal lexemes in syntax (e.g. impersonal, intransitive, transitive, ditransitive, etc.,) and the semantic arguments that are realized in these patterns. Presenting cases in (mostly) English and French to illustrate the issue, the students will be exposed to different approaches proposed in the literature to account for these patterns, evaluating their capacity to make predictions, theoretical costs, and so on.

WINTER 2026

Linguist 9620 - Issues in Theoretical Phonology

Thursday, 11:30AM - 2:30PM
University College room 2120
Prof. David Heap

A range of readings are used to examine different aspects of segmental phonology, comparing and contrasting more recent frameworks with earlier theories. The emphasis is on the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches in accounting for linguistic data. Students explore a range of datasets from various languages to illustrate phonological processes and cross-linguistic typological patterns. Students complete a number of steps in a research project: literature review, data analysis, abstract, presentation (poster), and final paper. Starting point: we will survey a selection of topics as an overview of current phonological theory, based on the Cambridge Handbook of Phonology (Paul de Lacy, ed, 2007, henceforth CHP). Background from previous periods of (generative and other) phonological theory can be added as appropriate, along with other readings.

The weighting of evaluation and the calendar of topics will be discussed and determined in the first class.

Linguistics 9640 - Morphology

Wednesday, 9:30AM - 12:30PM
University College room 2120
Prof. Ileana Paul

Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words, of the processes by which words are created, and of the relation of words and word-parts to meanings and to syntax. This course will survey some of the important phenomena which have been noted in the course of recent morphological research and the major approaches which have been proposed to deal with them. Where possible readings will be taken from the primary linguistic literature focussing on key articles and monographs. We will be exploring a shift from a lexicon-based to a syntax-based theory of morphology, but in order to do this, we will (i) develop a common vocabulary to discuss morphological structure, and (ii) explore ways that theoretical constructs can be used to represent morphological structures. The overall take home message should be that all theories are works in progress and closely tied to the datasets that they can explain.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, students should be able to:

understand basic concepts of morphology
recognize morphological patterns in language data
apply basic morphological concepts to language data
understand two different approaches to morphological data
- Lexicalism
- Distributed Morphology (morphology is syntax)
construct analyses for language data using both of these approaches 
read and understand primary morphological literature
transfer this understanding through article summaries and data presentation

Program-level learning outcomes

By the end of the course, students will:

Achieve a solid grounding in current scholarship in morphology
Know how to use primary sources (published texts, collected data or archives) and secondary sources (corpora of scholarship)
Identify an appropriate research question and methods
Situate research in relation to literature
Identify, locate and collect data relevant to a given issue
Analyze different kinds of evidence, evaluate different research methods, assess strengths and weaknesses of a given argument
Engage with faculty and peers in discussions about evidence, methods, theory, ethics and knowledge mobilization
Prepare individual and group oral presentations
Express evidence-based arguments in well-structured writing in a variety of formats
Assess and communicate constructive criticism to students and peers, orally and in writing
Learn the limits of their own knowledge, and the way this knowledge is situated within specific critical and disciplinary paradigms, both by engagement with other students and with faculty in a range of fields, and by reading the scholarly literature
Appreciate multiple intellectual viewpoints and ways of knowing, and understand how these produce an awareness of the limits of knowledge offered by any specific discourse