UMass Ling 401: Syllabus (Spring 2004)

Ling 401: Introduction to Syntax
UMass, Amherst, Spring 2004

Meeting times:		MWF, 10:10am - 11:00am
Meeting place:		Dickinson 110
Instructor:		Chris Potts

		545-6826
Office hours:		Wednesdays, 11:30am - 12:30pm;
		Thursdays, 4:30pm - 5:30pm
Class website:		http://people.umass.edu/potts/syntax04/

What syntactic properties are shared by all natural languages? What syntactic properties distinguish them? What does a syntactic theory look like? What are the goals of such a theory? This course aims to equip students with the ability to address these questions in a precise and informed way. The topics include those that have shaped, and continue to shape, theoretical syntax: phrase structure, transformations, grammatical relations, anaphora, long-distance movement.

Prerequisites

Ling 201 (Introduction to Linguistics) or the consent of the instructor

Requirements

participation during class, in e-mail to me, or during my office hours (10%)
regular assignments (a total of 60%)
two take-home exams, the first distributed on March 5 and due on March 12, the second distributed on May 7 and due May 14 (a combined 30%)

Some policies

You are welcome to work together on the regular assignments, but joint assignments are not allowed. Please list the names of everyone you worked with at the top of each assignment.
You cannot work together on the exams.
The assignments and exams will address only material that we covered in class (and appropriate extensions of it). So active and engaged participation in the class meetings is essential to your success on them.
I will drop your lowest regular-assignment grade (even if it is a 0), on the condition that you participate in one of the experiments being run by UMass Linguistics researchers this semester. These experiments typically involve speaking, writing, or listening. If no experiment is available in the time frame, then you can redo the assignment.

Themes

grammaticality and related issues
constituency
categories
trees and tree diagrams
phrase structure rules
agreement systems and features
transformations
- subject--auxiliary inversion
- passive
- there-insertion
unbounded dependencies: interrogatives, relative clauses, others
anaphora and binding theory
verb-phrase ellipsis

Supplementary texts (optional)

I will occasionally distribute short, compulsory reading assignments. But in general we'll rely on the classroom discussions to find questions, test hypothesis, and develop the theory.

The following are good supplementary resources, things you might study as a way of deepening or broadening your understanding of what syntactic theory is all about:

Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Note: This is available in the reference section of DuBois Library, call number PE1106 .H74 2002.]
McCawley, James D. 1998. The Syntactic Phenomena of English, 2nd ed. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
O'Grady, William; Michael Dubrovolsky; and Mark Aronoff. Linguistics: An Introduction. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Radford, Andrew, 1988. Transformational Grammar: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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