Baltin, Collins, Gouskova, Szabolcsi. Offered every semester. 4 points. Nature or nurture? Linguistics is a science that systematically addresses this puzzle, and it offers a uniquely interesting support for the answer: both. Language is a social phenomenon, but human languages share elaborate and specific structural properties. The conventions of speech communities exist, exhibit variation, and change within the strict confines of universal grammar, part of our biological endowment. Universal grammar is discovered through the careful study of the structures of individual languages, by cross-linguistic investigations, and the investigation of the brain. In this way, linguistics mediates between cognitive science and social science. This course introduces some fundamental properties of the sound system and of the structure and interpretation of words and sentences, set into this context.