Ling 401; Chris Potts; UMass, Amherst, Spring 2004

Ling 401: Introduction to Syntax

Lecture notes, handouts, assignments

Department of Linguistics, UMass Amherst 

* = no class

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Friday, May 7, 2004
Final exam (due May 19)
Wednesday, May 5, 2004
Handout: More Wh-movements, more islands
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Handout: What is case?
Handout: Unbounded dependencies, sometimes bounded
Monday, April 26, 2004
Handout: A first look at Wh-movement
Friday, April 23, 2004
Assignment 9 (due April 28 30)
My answers to Assignment 9
Thursday, April 22, 2004 (an acting Monday)
Group project: A first look at Wh-questions in English
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Handout: Raising or exceptional case marking?
Friday, April 16, 2004
Handout: Raising and control
Monday, April 12, 2004
Handout: Unaccusatives cross-linguistically
Friday, April 9, 2004
Handout: A skeptical look at our theory of passives
Wednesday, April 7, 2004
Handout: Passives and unaccusatives
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
Assignment 8 (begun as group work today and April 2; due April 5)
Friday, March 26, 2004
Handout: More on head movement
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Assignment 7 (due March 29)
My answers to Assignment 7
Handout: Introduction to transformations
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
Some puzzles (in-class group work)
Friday, March 5, 2004
Midterm exam (due March 12)
Handout: From S to IP
Monday, March 1, 2004
Assignment 6: Grammars and their predictions (due March 5)
Friday, February 27, 2004
Handout: Head features
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Handout: A local-tree library, Part 2: NP (with two minor corrections)
Monday, February 23, 2004
Handout: A local-tree library, Part 1: S and VP
Friday, February 20, 2004
Assignment 5: Are embedded interrogative clauses NPs? (due February 25)
My answers to Assignment 5
Handout: Where we're at, plus notes on labelled bracketing and crossing branches
Saturday, February 14, 2004 (Valentine's Day Special!)
A summary of the category tests we've explored (HTML)
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Assignment 4: Preposition hunting (due February 18)
Required reading for Assignment 4: Geoff Pullum's ABC Radio Talk 'The nature of prepositions' in HTML or PDF
Supplementary reading for Assignment 4: Geoff Pullum's ABC Radio Talk 'Prepositions'
Monday, February 9, 2004
Handout: Categories
Friday, February 6, 2004
Assignment 3: Syntactic categories (due February 11)
My answers to Assignment 3
Wednesday, February 4, 2004
Handout: Trees in linguistics
Friday, January 30, 2004
Handout: Constituency tests
Assignment 2: Constituency (due February 4)
My answers to Assignment 2
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
The lecture notes in handout format
Assignment 1: Getting at grammaticality (due January 30)
My answers to Assignment 1

Creation date: January 28, 2004 (Christopher Potts)
Last update: May 10, 2004 (Christopher Potts)