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Semester 2

Syntax: Theory and Practice (LASC10084)

Subject

Language Sciences and Linguistics

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

3

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Visiting students should have completed at least 3 Linguistics/Language Sciences courses at grade B or above. We will only consider University/College level courses. One of these courses must have a substantial focus on syntax.

Course Summary

The course will situate the work that students have already done in syntax in years 1 and 2 with respect to basic issues in syntactic theory: the domain of syntax, the nature of syntactic systems. It will develop a systematic overview of the properties of a generative grammar, working through some of the most basic syntactic constructions that have been studied, and focussing on reasoning and argumentation in developing a syntactic analysis.

Course Description

The aim of this course is to provide an introduction to the modern generative approach to syntax. Students taking this course will already be familiar with a number of important syntactic phenomena and with some of the important concepts and terms that make it possible to describe the syntax of human languages in a precise way, and to understand descriptions in the current literature. In this course we will be building on these foundations, in order to gain an understanding of how researchers have tried, and are trying, to address questions such as: What is a possible syntactic system? What are the primitives of syntax? How different can the syntax of one language be from the syntax of another? The course will set out in a systematic way a generative approach to these questions, with the aim of bringing students to the point at which they will be able to begin to read, in a critical way, the primary literature in the field. At the same time, there will be an emphasis throughout on understanding how hypotheses about syntax - syntactic analyses - are developed, tested, compared, and evaluated.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0%

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