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This is an archived course. A more recent version may be available at ocw.mit.edu.
Some interesting and useful links are given below, grouped by topic.
SIL, a comprehensive site of the Summer Institute of Linguistics
Online grammars with information about various languages
I can eat glass project, with the phrase I can eat glass, it doesn't hurt me in various languages
A Web site containing various symbols from ideograms carved in mammoth tusks by Cro-Magnon men to subway graffiti
A site on writing systems
Yet another site on writing systems, some phonetics, and writing system links grouped by region
An ASL (American Sign Language) Dictionary
A collection of links grouped according to introductory topics
Wordnet, a lexical database for English
Tutorial on concordances and corpora
Sounds of animals in a number of languages
MIT Endangered Language Initiative
Web of Morphology, parsers and papers on morphological theory and analyses of various languages
Syntax course from the University of Pennsylvania (more advanced than in the textbook)
Trees 2, a tree-drawing software, also from the University of Pennsylvania
Kai von Fintel's page of Semantics Web Resources
The semantics archive, a collection of formal semantics papers
UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive, with audio examples of IPA symbols and many different sounds
Video of tongue movement during vowel pronunciation
Sammy, the interactive saggital section
Web site of the International Phonetic Association
Some hints on how to read spectrograms
A mix of links, mostly phonetics-related
CSU Pomona College Slang Dictionary
Some jargon sites here and here
A radio program with William Labov on regional accents in the US
CHILDES database with first language acquisition data (a large number of languages)
LSA language acquisition course materials from Stephen Crain
Neurolinguistics lab at CUNY
Other neuroscience and neurolinguistics links here
Other resources for language processing
Center for language and speech processing at John Hopkins University
NLP projects at Microsoft®
Some useful resources are listed below. You may also find relevant information under links in this section.
Praat for doing phonetics
Download IPA fonts to use with Winword here (SIL fonts; also for Macintosh®) or here (IPA Sam)
You can use Praat, among others, to draw spectrograms and intonation contours. To use it, you need only a microphone in addition to the program. You can save the images and insert them into texts.
When you open Praat, you see two windows: Praat objects, and Praat picture. You can capture sounds in Praat objects. Choose New, and then Record mono (or stereo, if you have the appropriate device) sound. You can capture sounds after you press Record. When you stopped recording, save it. Choose Write to wav file from the File menu, and choose a destination folder.
Still in the Praat objects window, choose Read from file from the Read menu. Choose the .wav file you just created. When your file appears in the left-hand window, you can choose to draw a spectrogram or to draw the formants only.
To draw spectrograms, choose Spectrum in the right-hand menu. In the pop-up list, choose To Spectrogram. Accept the default settings (you may have to adjust the maximum frequency according to the pitch of the voice you recorded; about 5000Hz for an adult female voice), and choose Gaussian, Hannin or Hamming window shape. The picture will appear below the sound file. Choose the spectrogram file, and select View from the right-hand menu. Your spectrogram will pop up in a new window.
To draw pitch tracks, choose Periodicity from the right-hand menu in Praat objects. Choose Pitch, and accept the default settings. The pitch file will again appear below the sound file, in the Praat objects window. Select Draw from the menu on the right. Choose Draw from the pop-up menu, and accept the default values. Choose OK, and the pitch tracks will appear in the Praat picture window.
To see all the formants, select the sound file, and choose Formants&LPC from the right-hand menu. Select Formant(burg), and press OK. Again, the formant file will appear below the sound file. Select the formant file, and choose Draw. Choose Draw Tracks, Speckle, or Scatter plot from the pop-up menu. Again, the formants will be displayed in the Praat picture window.
Feel free to experiment with the settings and values until you get spectrograms, pitch tracks and formants of the kind you see in the examples. You can also do a number of different things with Praat; browse through the possibilities.
Download Praat and find a lot more information here.
Baker, M. The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN: 019860632X.
Bauer, L., and P. Trudgill, eds. Language Myths. New York, NY: Penguin, 1998. ISBN: 0140260234.
Chomsky, N. On Nature and Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN: 052101624X.
Crystal, D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ISBN: 0521530334.
Jackendoff, R. Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, and Evolution. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN: 0199264376.
McCawley, J. Everything That Linguists Have Always Wanted To Know About Logic (But Were Ashamed To Ask). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980. ISBN: 0226556115.
Pinker, S. The Language Instinct. New York, NY: William Morrow, 1994. ISBN: 0688121411.
Pinker, S. Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2000. ISBN: 0060958405.
Pullum, G. The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991. ISBN: 0226685349.
Smith, N. Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN: 0521546885.
Akmajian, A., et. al. Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. ISBN: 0262511231.
Fromkin, et. al. Linguistics: An Introduction to Linguistic Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. ISBN: 0631197117.
O'Grady, W., et. al. Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. 4th ed. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2001. ISBN: 0312419368.
Haspelmath, M. Understanding Morphology. London, UK: Arnold, 2002. ISBN: 0340760265.
Matthews, P. Morphology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN: 0521422566.
Spencer, A. Morphological Theory: An Introduction to Word Structure in Generative Grammar. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1991. ISBN: 0631161449.
Carnie, A. Syntax: A Generative Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. ISBN: 0631225447.
Culicover, P. Principles and Parameters: An Introduction to Syntactic Theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997. ISBN: 0198700156.
Haegeman, L. Introduction to Government and Binding Theory. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994. ISBN: 0631190678.
Radford, A. Transformational Grammar. A First Course. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988. ISBN: 0521347505.
Radford, A. Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ISBN: 0521477077.
Radford, A. Syntax: A Minimalist Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ISBN: 0521589142. [An abridged version of the above.]
Chierchia, G., and S. McConnell-Ginet. Meaning and Grammar: An Introduction to Semantics. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. ISBN: 026253164X.
De Swart, Henriëtte. Introduction to Natural Language Semantics. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 1998. ISBN: 1575861380.
Larson, R. K., and G. Segal. Knowledge of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. ISBN: 0262621002.
Davenport, M., and S. J. Hannahs. Introducing Phonetics and Phonology. London, UK: Arnold, 1998. ISBN: 0340662174.
Giegerich, H. English Phonology: an Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ISBN: 0521333032.
Harris, James. English Sound Structure. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994. ISBN: 0631187413.
Katamba, Francis. An Introduction to Phonology. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989. ISBN: 058229150X.
Kenstowicz, Michael. Phonology in Generative Grammar. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994. ISBN: 1557864268.
Kreidler, Charles W. The Pronunciation of English: A Course Book in Phonology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1989. ISBN: 0631162194.
Spencer, Andrew. Phonology: Theory and Description. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. ISBN: 0631192336.
Campbell, L. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. ISBN: 0262531593.
Chambers, J. K., and P. Trudgill. Dialectology. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0521596467.
Crowley, T. An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. 3rd ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN: 0195583787.
DeGraff, M. Language Creation and Language Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. ISBN: 0262541262.
Francis, W. N. Dialectology: An Introduction. New York: NY: Longman, 1983. ISBN: 0582291178.
Lehmann, Winfred Philipp. Historical Linguistics. 3rd ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. ISBN: 0030114306.
McMahon, A. Understanding Language Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ISBN: 0521446651.
Sihler, A. Language History: An Introduction. Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins, 2000. ISBN: 1556199694.
Trask, L. Historical Linguistics. New York: Arnold, 1996. ISBN: 0340607580.
Clark, E. First Language Acquisition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0521629977.
Fletcher, P., and M. Garman, eds. Language Acquisition: Studies in First Language Development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ISBN: 0521277809.
Guasti, M. T. Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. ISBN: 0262572206.
Ingram, D. First Language Acquisition: Method, Description and Explanation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN: 0521349168.
White, L. Second Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0521796474.
Wexler, K., and P. Culicover. Formal Principle of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. ISBN: 0262730669.
Bever, T., and D. Townsend. Sentence Comprehension. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. ISBN: 0262700808.
Jurafsky, et. al. Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000. ISBN: 0130950696.
Manning, C., and H. Schütze. Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. ISBN: 0262133601.
See also the bibliography at the end of each chapter in the textbook.
Here is a link to a Web site discussing the drawing of trees. Be aware that linguists do not uniformly label the tree nodes with the same labels. Remember that I have noted in class that where someone uses "DP" interpret this as an "NP" and where someone uses "TP" interpret this as "IP". Also, note that many still use "S" instead of "CP" or "IP." I think that in spite of some of these notational variations, you should be able to use the material: Structural Relations.
The Theory of Language curriculum module from the The Mind Project Web site. The Mind Project, a student-faculty, research and curriculum project in the cognitive and learning science.
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