Syntactic Recursion

In the MA program, I taught a class on syntactic recursion during the winter term 2020/21. This is a topic that I have studied quite extensively before, and it features prominently in several past and ongoing grant proposals. I also think it’s an important and interesting topic that touches several fundamental debates in linguistics. I’m quite happy with the selection of texts we ended up discussing and the overall format. You can find my syllabus here.

Daakaka grammar class

One of the wonderful features of the linguistics curriculum at HHU are the obligatory classes on structures of non-Indoeuropean languages. They take 4 hours per week, instead of the regular 2, and I’m looking forward to teaching them on a regular basis. For the winter term of 2020/21, I taught a class on Daakaka. I’m quite happy with how it turned out, and so were my students. In the future, I’ll have to put more work into creating coherence. I might have gone a little wild with all the great tools one can explore during practice sessions. The syllabus can be found here. Since this was an online class, I also created short video lectures, some of which can be found here. If you want access to the full class on Moodle, or have comments or questions, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Exploring linguistic typology through language puzzles

In this class, we solve a linguistic puzzle each week, primarily from the International Olympiad of Linguistics. Topics include writing systems, number systems, verbal morphology, kinship systems, and others. I first taught this class in the winter of 2020/21. You can use my syllabus for inspiration, if you’d like to try this out. My students loved the class and so did I. Since this was a distant-learning class, I also prepared short video lectures for each session. You can watch some of them at the HHU mediathek. I will definitely teach this class again, probably with varying sets of puzzles.