Syllabus

LING 449U · How words are built · Fall 2026

Basics

meets

Tuesday and Thursday, 2:00 to 3:15pm, JMZ 1104

instructor

Utku Turk

email

utkuturk@umd.edu

office

Marie Mount Hall 3416. Book a time.

prerequisite

LING 311

credits

3

A minimum grade of C- is required to pass this course.

Description

In this seminar, we will investigate works that focus on how morphological structure is planned and computed during sentence production. After discussing seminal works on non-complex words and understanding their claims on how such words are retrieved and produced in real time, we will try to tackle a series of old and new puzzles surrounding productive machinery that creates complex lexical items that span across multiple syntactic positions. We will also cover recent morphosyntax theories of Distributed Morphology and Nanosyntax, which already present substantial improvement on how multiple syntactic positions find their fate within a single word. Lastly, we will try to build an experiment, run it, and analyze its results.

Course objectives

After completing this class you will be able to:

  1. Demonstrate understanding of model parts of prominent language production models and theoretical underpinnings of modern morphological theories.
  2. Think critically about possible predictions of formal linguistic models on psychological theories of language production.
  3. Locate overlooked aspects of morphosyntax and morphophonology within language production.
  4. Produce novel experiment ideas to behaviorally examine such overlooked corners.
  5. Link your results or predictions with foundational questions in sentence production and morphology.
  6. Conduct and analyze behavioral experiments.

Required resources

There is no textbook for this course. All readings will be posted to ELMS. I highly recommend simply accessing these digitally (there are quite a few programs and apps out there you can use to annotate them as well) to save paper. If you would ever like me to print out a text for you, though, just email me ahead of time and I would be happy to do so.

The week-by-week plan is on the schedule page.

Class slides

Course structure

Discussion

This course will be heavily discussion based, and discussions will center around readings, in-class slide shows, activities, and any relevant course-external research you or a peer may wish to include. There are relatively few assignments, and the assignments we do have are very short, so I expect readings to be our primary focus, and as such I expect the class to put time and effort into each reading assigned.

Bringing questions

No one goes through a paper and does not have any questions. While some of the thinking we do will be together as a group, quite a bit of it will be done individually, when you go over readings outside of class. To assist in this, I will ask you to send me a question before the class about the reading we did. This question can be related to anything in the reading, but it is mainly towards helping you understand the paper more clearly. Due dates for these reflections will typically be the midnight before the class (11:59pm). There will be an ELMS discussion thread for you to post your questions, with other responses locked until you submit yours. You can skip up to three question submissions without any consequences.

Syntheses

Until the end of Week 9, I will ask you to write three short reflections. Syntheses will consist of one question that requires a no more than half a page answer. For instance, if during the last week or two we focused on speech errors, I might ask: “How might someone test the hypothesis that morphosyntactically complex words cannot go through long-distance speech error?” or “Why do you think the same category elements can participate in long-distance speech errors, but elements of different categories cannot?” The aim of these reflections is to pull together a couple of papers and the ideas within and synthesize our own thoughts and discussions. Due dates will typically be Sundays at midnight (11:59pm). These synthesis questions and homeworks will be posted to ELMS announcements, and I will expect you to turn in PDFs.

Presentations

To prepare for final projects, I will ask everyone in the class to present a paper that we read in the lock-in weeks of the semester (Weeks 6 to 10). This will primarily involve three things: (i) choosing a paper from a list, (ii) reading the paper well in-depth enough to lead the discussion about it, (iii) bringing along some presentation aid (a slideshow, handout, etc.). During the discussion I expect you to go over the background of the paper, the questions it asks, assumptions the authors make, experiment details such as method, measurement, and logic, and conclusions that can be drawn from the results. By that point in the semester we will all be very familiar with how discussions go and I will have presented a number of papers, so this assignment should be fairly straightforward.

Coding work

Past fall break, we will be focusing more on the dirty work of experimentation. This part will include thinking about the materials, designs, measures, populations, and all the other logistically necessary sides of experimentation. It will also include some coding work for R and JavaScript, since it is almost necessary to work with these tools to create and deploy experiments, as well as simulate and analyze the data. I will assign weekly, very short, coding exercises to help you practice outside of the class at least 10 minutes a day. This code work will not be graded and it is completely optional. In the case of you requiring extra grade for any reason, this may kick in. The assignments that will be provided will not include writing code from scratch; instead they will require modifying an existing code for your own purposes.

Course projects

Towards the middle of the semester, after we have covered the foundations of production, we will begin to work on projects. The end product for these projects will be an experiment proposal for a language-production-related experiment in a language other than English, including understudied dialects of English. You will not only have to explain the experiment itself (which method is to be used, which structure or class of words is to be examined, etc.), but also why it matters for the core questions we ask in this course. Yet, do not be worried, since Weeks 11 to 15 will be focused on these aspects of experiment building.

For instance, you might ask what the copular variation (be/is/are) in African-American Vernacular English tells us about the representation of agreement, which you could connect to hypotheses regarding the presence and absence of a morphophonological form and underlying morphosyntactic structure. Or you might ask whether prefix stacking in Polish, as in po-na-ścinać ‘cut something down in large quantity, one by one,’ follows what we know about serialization of concepts into morphologically intact strings, important because it has bearing on when speakers of a language unitize certain phrases or when the head of a phrase kicks in.

We will have preparatory project assignments in the last half of the course:

Piece Points
A short brainstorming submission describing preliminary project ideas 2.5
An initial one-on-one meeting with me about your brainstormed ideas 2.5
5-minute in-class presentation 5
1-page rough draft of the proposal 5
10-minute in-class presentation 5
2-page final draft of your experiment proposal 10

These assignments are in addition to group check-ins in class, where we discuss project progression as a group and give one another ideas, comments, and concerns.

The final draft will lay the foundations for your presentation. It should give the appropriate background for your proposal, detailing the language and phenomena of interest as well as why it is interesting relative to assumptions about memory and production. The experimental logic should be stated as clearly as possible for a reader to understand how and why that experimental procedure and measure can be used to make inferences about underlying processes.

Finally, in the last week of class everyone will present their project, walking the audience through the background, logic of the experiment, experiment details, and connections to bigger questions.

Grading

Component Weight
Participation 30%
Bringing questions 10%
Syntheses 20%
Presentation 10%
Project 30%
Coding 0%
Letter Range Letter Range
A+ 97 to 100 C+ 77 to 79.99
A 92 to 96.99 C 72 to 76.99
A- 90 to 91.99 C- 70 to 71.99
B+ 87 to 89.99 F below 70
B 82 to 86.99
B- 80 to 81.99

Attendance and participation

Attendance is expected. If you must miss class, email me in advance (even one minute before the class is fine). You are still responsible for all the required materials. A large portion of your grade will relate to your participation in class. I expect you to be present, prepared, and engaged. This means that you should come to class having read the readings thoroughly enough to respond to questions and discuss key details, you should be invested in the content of class discussions, and should pay attention to me and your peers. Simply, you should come to class, talk, ask questions, and not attend to class-unrelated things during class time. This will be a smaller class so I imagine it will be very easy to reach these standards.

Should repeated issues with participation come up I may get in contact with you to remind you that participation is graded and to see if there may be anything I could do to assist in your participation. If you feel you cannot participate for any reason that I can help with, please get in contact with me and we can discuss solutions.

Late work

Late reading questions are not accepted, since they are given in the class. Proposal and presentation deadlines are firm (completion credit). Late synthesis submissions are multiplied by a factor of 0.9 raised to the square root of the delay. You should not worry if your submission is late up to 30 minutes; past that it will be counted as late the entire day.

If you need extra time to complete an assignment, please do not hesitate to get in contact with me before the due date. A request for more time can be as simple as an estimate for a new submission time and a reason like “Other courses have been very busy” or “I had a medical issue” or even “My dog threw up and I had to wash a rug at 11pm”. If I do not reply with a “no”, you should assume that your extension is accepted.

Communication

I expect most of the one-on-one communication (outside of class) to come from email. If you need to reach out and communicate with me, please email me at utkuturk@umd.edu. When emailing be sure your answer cannot be found by going over the syllabus or the ELMS page. Feel free to email me about any other academic, intellectual, or personal (as it relates to academic affairs) concerns or questions. You can also just grab a slot on my calendar. I will do my best to respond to emails within 24 hours, though if I do not respond within about 48 hours feel free to follow up.

I will send class-wide announcements via ELMS. You must make sure that your email and announcement notifications (including changes in assignments and due dates) are enabled in ELMS so you do not miss any messages. You are responsible for checking your email and ELMS inbox with regular frequency (as am I).

Communication with peers

With a diversity of perspectives and experience, we may find ourselves in disagreement or debate with one another. As such, it is important that we agree to conduct ourselves in a professional manner and that we work together to foster and preserve a classroom environment in which we can respectfully discuss and deliberate controversial questions. I encourage you to confidently exercise your right to free speech, bearing in mind, of course, that you will be expected to craft and defend arguments that support your position. Keep in mind that free speech has its limit and this course is NOT the space for hate speech, harassment, and derogatory language. I will make every reasonable attempt to create an atmosphere in which each student feels comfortable voicing their argument without fear of being personally attacked, mocked, demeaned, or devalued. Any behavior (including harassment, sexual harassment, and racially or culturally derogatory language) that threatens this atmosphere will not be tolerated. Please alert me immediately if you feel threatened, dismissed, or silenced at any point during our semester together, or if your engagement in discussion has been in some way hindered by the learning environment.

Academic integrity

I expect all the submitted work to be your own, written by you. You are welcome to discuss your work with your peers, other colleagues, as well as AI. Discussing, bouncing ideas, being inspired from these sources is not the problem. The problem starts when the submitted work is generated by somebody or something else, and it has not gone through your own filtering process.

Just remember that it is rude to show people AI slop.

If a work shows clear AI copy-paste, or I suspect that you contributed unfiltered AI output (i.e. what you said in class contradicts or otherwise seems very inconsistent relative to your reading response), I will contact you to schedule a meeting, we will discuss your response, and in some cases your assignment score may be lowered.

Similarly, plagiarism of existing sources or copying work from your peers will not be tolerated. It is your job to properly cite any course-external sources you use to complete an assignment or reading response. Similarly, I expect you to note down (or cite) your peers or your usage of AI in your answers. Also read and understand the University’s Code of Academic Integrity.

Accessibility

If you need accommodations, register with ADS and share your letter early. I am happy to discuss implementation anytime.

Mental health

If you are struggling, academically or personally, please reach out. Many problems seem insurmountable when tackled alone. I am happy to work with you to make the class not a problem for you.

University policies

Emergency preparedness. Emergencies on campus can happen at any time. To prepare, visit prepare.umd.edu or use the emergency symbol in the UMD App to review information. Resources for persons with disabilities are available on the emergency preparedness page of the ADA Coordinator’s website.

Notice of mandatory reporting. Notice of mandatory reporting of sexual assault, sexual harassment, interpersonal violence, and stalking: as a faculty member, I am designated as a “Responsible University Employee,” and I must report all disclosures of sexual assault, sexual harassment, interpersonal violence, and stalking to UMD’s Title IX Coordinator per University Policy on Sexual Harassment and Other Sexual Misconduct. If you wish to speak with someone confidentially, please contact one of UMD’s confidential resources, such as CARE to Stop Violence (Ground Floor of the Health Center) at 301-741-3442 or the Counseling Center (Shoemaker Building) at 301-314-7651. You may also seek assistance or supportive measures from UMD’s Title IX Coordinator by calling 301-405-1142 or emailing titleIXcoordinator@umd.edu. Further information is on the Office of Civil Rights and Sexual Misconduct’s website at ocrsm.umd.edu.

Basic needs security. If you have difficulty affording groceries or accessing sufficient food to eat every day, or lack a safe and stable place to live, please visit UMD’s Division of Student Affairs website for information about resources the campus offers you, and let me know if I can help in any way.

Veteran resources. UMD provides some additional support to our student veterans. You can access those resources at the Office of Veteran Student Life and the Counseling Center. Veterans and active duty military personnel with special circumstances (e.g. upcoming deployments, drill requirements, disabilities) are welcome and encouraged to communicate these, in advance if possible, to the instructor.

Course evaluation. Please submit a course evaluation through Student Feedback on Course Experiences in order to help faculty and administrators improve teaching and learning at Maryland. All information submitted is confidential. Campus will notify you when Course Experiences is open at the end of the semester.

Copyright. Course materials are copyrighted and may not be reproduced for anything other than personal use without written permission.