Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/University of British Columbia/Linguistics (Fall 2013)/Course description

Linguistics 300: Syntax (Studies in Grammar)
Term: 2013, Winter Session, Term 1

Start and end dates: 3 September 2013 - 10 December 2013

Number of students: 77

Status: in session

Description of the course
Syntax is the branch of linguistics that deals with the structure of sentences.Syntax, understood as the (implicit) knowledge that a speaker has of the sentence structure of their language, is a core component of the human language faculty, and interfaces with all aspects of grammar. Syntax shapes meaning, as it provides input structures over which rules of semantic interpretation (“Logical Form” or LF) are calculated. Syntax also shapes prosody (phonology), as it provides input structures over which rules of phonological interpretation (“Phonetic Form” or PF) are calculated. We will therefore be concerned with: (i) what the study of sentence structure reveals about the organization of the grammar; (ii) how syntax interfaces with other components of the grammar.

Goals and objectives
Learning outcomes for this course include:

• Becoming familiar with the techniques that linguists use to identify syntactic structures. Which analytic tools and concepts do linguists use to investigate the syntactic properties of natural languages? Are sentences formed by recursively combining units into hierarchical structures or do they come as ready-made “constructions”? What does our theory of sentence structure tell us about the content and organization of the grammar? (This is the focus of Unit I.)

• Becoming familiar with how linguists model local syntactic relations. Which analytic tools and concepts do linguists use to investigate “locality constraints”? What accounts for the headedness of phrases? What is the significance of recursion? What is the nature of the relation between transitivity, grammatical function, and semantic role? (This is the focus of Unit II).

• Becoming familiar with how linguists model non-local syntactic relations. Which analytic tools and concepts do linguists use to investigate “the displacement property”. Why are non-local relations possible at all? What role does feature-sharing play? How is “movement” related to “binding”? (This is the focus of Unit III.)

• Becoming an expert in a domain of knowledge and contribute to knowledge production in that domain. This will take the form of Wikipedia projects, which will focus on the following four themes: binding theory (Theme A); theta theory (Theme B); CP syntax (Theme C); DP syntax (Theme C).

Instructor
Rose-Marie Déchaine

Teaching assistant
Adriana Osa Gómez

Campus ambassadors
To be announced.

Student groups
To be announced.

Theme A: Binding theory
• A1 Reciprocal pronoun • A2 Sloppy identity • A3 Empty categories • A4 Resumptive pronoun

Theme B: Theta theory
• B1 Burzio's generalization • B2 Causative alternation • B3 Resultative • B4 Volition

Theme C: CP syntax
• C1 A-not-A question • C2 Nominal sentence • C3 Relativizer • C4 Sentence word

Theme D: DP syntax
• D1 Case role • D2 Dative shift • D3 Determiner Phrase • D4 Partitive

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