Linguistics 550 is an introduction to the systematic study of natural language syntax for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in linguistics and allied fields. The course presents the motivation for the modern generative approach to the scientific study of language and develops systematically a generative transformational treatment of the most basic syntactic constructions of natural language. The intellectual emphasis of the course is on understanding the reasoning process that guides syntactic analysis, especially the role of the Universal Grammar hypothesis and the logical problem of language acquisition in guiding research.
The first part of the course is based on a web textbook that was written here at Penn by Beatrice Santorini and myself. The book is updated from time to time and the current version will always be available from this page. It can be read on screen and/or printed out. For some students this material will provide a new perspective on familiar material while for others it will be new. The lectures and exercises will presume familiarity with the relevant chapters of the text and will amplify or comment on them.
The second part of the course aims to introduce students to reading and analyzing critically the primary literature in contemporary generative syntax. This part of the course investigates three topics: verb movement, the shell analysis of double objects and the use of Tree Adjoining Grammar as the formal notation of Universal Grammar.
Course assignments in the first part of the course will consist of weekly
homework exercises and a take home exam. The assigments must be handed in by
email. Hard copy will not be accepted. The homework makes extensive use of the
TREES program developed here at Penn for the teaching of syntax. Instructions
and links for downloading both the Windows and the Mac versions of the program are
available The Trees program works by running grammar tools. For each exercise that
uses the program, you will be asked to download a grammar tool, which
should be placed in the same directory as the program. Grammar tools are
loaded into the program with the "Choose Grammar" menu item under the
program's "File" menu. The program is also useful for drawing trees to be
pasted into word processing documents. Download the tree-drawing grammar tool
here for that purpose.
I'd like you to use the Latex document mark-up language for the assignments
rather than a word-processing program like MSWord because Latex is a scientific
standard nowadays. Since you may not know Latex at this point, I won't require
it in the first part of the course but the final assignment will have to be
formatted in Latex.
The second part of the course will involve somewhat more complex
homework problems and a final short squib. Readings for the
second part of the course that are not available in the library will be
provided in class as needed.
Although syntax in its modern form developed only in the last 50 years, its
descriptive vocabulary is based on the terms and concepts of traditional
school grammar, as used in language teaching, especially the teaching of
Latin. For those with limited background in these concepts, it might be
useful to browse Allen and Greenough's Latin grammar, available through
the Perseus project (Click here).
7 weeks
Readings for part II
readings:
readings:
readings:
Supplementary readings (added as appropriate)
Course outline:
Part I: An introduction to generative transformational syntax