Andrew Ira Nevins: Teaching & Advising

Summer School Courses

I have taught in international linguistics summer school as part of:

Teaching at Harvard

Fall 2009 Courses
Freshman Seminar 22n. Slips of The Ear. Tue 1-3pm. Little scientific attention has been paid to "slips of the ear", during which listeners perceive something that was not what was actually said. In this freshman seminar, students keep a weekly journal of naturally occurring slips of the ear that they observe in their daily lives, report on them in class, and learn the methods of phonetic and semantic analysis that enable making sense of why these slips happen when and to whom.
Social Analysis 34. Knowledge of Language. Mon, Wed 1-2pm. What does our ability to acquire and use a language tell us about our essential human nature? This course examines the view of modern linguistics that knowledge of language is best characterized as an unconsciously internalized set of abstract rules and principles. Evidence is drawn from a variety of signed and spoken languages, language universals, child language acquisition, language change, language disorders, and language games. The course also addresses central issues in psychology, animal communication, computer science, and biology.

Fall 2008 Courses
Linguistics 117r: Field Methods. Language: Somali.

Fall 2007 Courses
Linguistics 152. Prosody and Intonation: Prosody and intonation are intricately linked to many domains of language use and linguistic structure. We examine the phonetic form of prosodic contours and intonational grouping, the function of prosody in expressing semantic and pragmatic information and in disambiguation during sentence production and comprehension, and the use of "implicit" prosody even in silent reading.Tues/Thurs, 10-11am.
Freshman Seminar 39x. How to Design a Communication System: Human, Animal, and Artificial Languages: (see description from Fall 2005).Wed, 3-5pm

Spring 2006 Courses
Linguistics 215. Advanced Phonology: The focus for 2006-07 will be on enriched phonological representations and on representational constraints: syllabification, subsyllabic constituency, autosegmental phonology, the phonological skeleton and timing tier, feature geometry, underspecification, metrical stress, and prosodic morphology.

Fall 2005 Courses
Freshman Seminar 39x. How to Design a Communication System: Human, Animal, and Artificial Languages:
What makes the communication systems of monkeys and people so different? The seminar will explore three lines of inquiry: the differences in hardware, software, and data structures of these communication systems. We will explore the important role of the speech production and perception apparatus, and the function of species-specific specializations in search of an initial answer. We will also consider the differences in combinatorial rules and constraints that enable and restrict communication systems as they build structured mappings from concept to sound. Finally, the seminar will explore functional perspectives that attempt to answer how much human language differs from that of birds, bees, primates, and frogs in considering the use of these communication systems for expression of intention, displaced reference, and deception. Seminar participants will thus have the opportunity to explore research methods in an integrative approach to studying communication. Students will collaborate in original experimental simulations into how formal and functional limitations shape the expressive capabilities of different communicative systems. Wed, 2-4pm.

Linguistics 114. (see description from Fall 2004)

Spring 2005 Courses
Linguistics 110. Introduction to Linguistics: An introduction to contemporary linguistic theory and methods of linguistic analysis: phonetic transcription, phonological, morphological, and syntactic analysis, and methods in comparative and historical linguistics. Some psycholinguistic aspects of language will also be examined. The discussion will draw on data from a wide variety of languages.Course Web Site. Mon/Wed, 10-11am.

Linguistics 115. Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology: Analysis of phonetic and phonological phenomena from a wide variety of languages. Topics include distinctive feature theory, underlying and surface representations, the abstractness of phonological representations, rules and their ordering, language acquisition and change. Training in phonetic transcription, spectrogram ("voiceprint") reading, and hypothesis-testing in phonological analysis.Course Web Site.Mon/Wed, 12-1pm.

Fall 2004 Courses
Linguistics 219r. Phonological Theory: An examination of why phonological phenomena exist at all, the nature of phonological computation, and the relationship of phonological representations to general properties of cognitive structures. Primary phenomena for exemplification are harmony, reduplication, and prominence/rhythm. Focus on conditions on phonology imposed by perception, articulation, the learning path, and the lexicon. Course Web Site. Wednesdays, 2-4pm.

Linguistics 114. Introduction to Morphology: An introduction to the analysis of word structure. Topics include the place of word formation in relation to phonological and syntactic phenomena, the nature of the lexicon, current theories of morphology, including Distributed Morphology. Consideration of morphological issues in psycholinguistics. Emphasis on the analysis of morphological phenomena in a wide range of typologically diverse languages. Course Web Site. Tuesdays & Thursdays, 12-1pm.

Extension School Courses
Introduction to Morphology. Spring 2006, Wed 7:35-9:35pm.
African-American English: How African and How American? Spring 2009.

Summer School Courses
Language and Cognition. Summer 2006, Tues/Thurs 3:30-6pm.
Introduction to Linguistics. Summer 2006, Tues/Thurs 6-8:30pm.

Advising

Dissertation Supervisor:
Gabriel Poliquin. 2006. Canadian French Vowel Harmony.
Patrick Liu. 2009. Investigations in Metrical Structure.
Aleksandra Makarova. 2009. Acquisition of Three Vowel Contrasts by Russian Speakers of American English.

Dissertation Committee Member:
Ruixi Ai. 2006. Elliptical Predicate Constructions in Mandarin.
Young-Suk Kim. 2007. Foundations of early literacy acquisition in Korean: Investigating development of phonological awareness, and the role of phonological awareness and letter-name knowledge in literacy acquisition.
Hakyung Jung. 2008. The grammar of have in a have-less language: Possession, perfect, and ergativity in North Russian.
Mark Knobel. 2009. Sublexical Factors in Word Production.
Kyongjoon Kwon. Expected 2010. The Development of Accusative Case in Russian.

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Supervisor:
Charles Harker Rhodes. 2009. On Linguicide.
Amelia Kimball. 2008. Transfer of tonicity and segmental phonology in L2 English and Italian.
Kobey Shwayder. 2007. Study of productivity and variation in Icelandic u-umlaut.
Amanda Dye. 2007. Mutatis mutandis : a dual experimental approach to mutation in Welsh.
Evan Siegel. 2007. Cross-modal perception of emotion : facial expression, vocal quality, music.
Caroline Whiting. 2006. One mind, two languages : examining models of bilingual lexical access through grammatical feature selection.

Doctoral-level Generals Papers Committee Member:
Sverre Johnsen. 2009. Contrast maintenance in Norwegian retroflexion.
Peter Jenks. 2009. Onsets, weight, and high tone doubling in Moro verb stems.
Jacopo Romoli. 2009. Toward a Structural Account of Conservativity.
Clemens Mayr. 2009. Non-Boolean conjunction of singular quantifiers and accommodation.
Dennis Ott. 2009. Diminutive-formation in German: Spelling out the classifier analysis.
Sverre Johnsen. 2008. Tense and binding in perception verb complements.
(Note: Harvard Linguistics did not have a generals paper requirement prior to 2008).

Masters' Thesis External Committee Member:
Inna Tolskaya. 2008. Oroch vowel harmony. University of Tromsø.
Patrycja Strycharczuk. 2009. Stress-epenthesis interaction and defect-driven rules. University of Tromsø.

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