Introduction to Comparative Syntax (Undergraduate 1)
Seminar: Syntax Reading Group (Advanced Undergraduate)
Seminar: The syntax of quantifiers (Post-grad)
English Grammar I
English Grammar II
English linguistics: First-Year TPs
Travaux pratiques de syntaxe comparative
Friday 9-10, B105
Genoveva Puskás Nerima
Syntax is one of the sub-domains of linguistics. Its object of study is the structure of the sentence and of its components. The lecture gives an introduction to the methods of syntactic analysis in the framework of generative grammar. It's goals are:
The acquisition of the syntactic tools is based on preliminary notions available to the students and builds upon these notions, focussing on the contrast between intuitive and explicit knowledge and on the formalization of this linguistic knowledge. The basic tools are then applied in the formal analysis of specific syntactic structures, with an emphasis on comparative approaches.
The class is doubled with a weekly TP (workshop) during which the students exercise the notions acquired in the lecture.
Friday, 10-12, B015
Genoveva Puskás Nerima
The Minimalist Program
The Topic of the reading group is an introduction to the Minimalist program. During the year, we will tackle several theoretical points, starting from the standard approach known as Principles and Parameters:
For each of these points, we examine what the minimalist program offers, and what consequences on syntactic theory the innovations might have. The various theoretical points are illustrated by specific readings, given throughout the year. The objective of the seminar is to be able to read a chapter of Chomsky's Minimalist Program.
The seminar presupposes basic notions in generative syntax.
Thursday, 14-16 (Winter), L208
Genoveva Puskás Nerima
The seminar discusses syntax-semantics interface problems with respect to quantification. It focusses on the relation between the interpretation and the syntactic properties of quantifiers. After an introduction to the theory of quantification, we shall briefly examine classical approaches to the syntax of quantification. We shall then discuss recent proposals as to the distribution and syntactic properties of quantifiers, proposals which link scope effects to syntactic properties. In the second part of the seminar, we shall examine the advantages as well as the limitations of these recent proposals. On the basis of Hungarian data, we will work on an elaboration of the syntactic scope analysis, and extend it to other languages.
English Grammar I:
The structure of English
Tabea Ihsane
Winter Semester
Group 1: Mon. 16-18, A-109 (Aile Jura)
Group 2: Tues. 12-14, L-208 (Landolt)
This seminar presupposes the material taught in the first year TP and the first year lecture.
After a brief recapitulation of the first year syntax program (argument structure, theta-criterion, X-bar format, government…), we will try to provide a systematic description of the English sentence, identifying the constituents and distinguishing the grammatical functions subject and object. While the prototypical subject is an NP, subjects may also be realised as PPs or as (small) clauses. Because of the subject requirement which stipulates that all English sentences must have a subject, expletive subjects may be inserted to fill the specifier of IP, the canonical subject position.
The rest of the semester will be devoted to case. The distribution of overt noun phrases is regulated by the Case-Filter. In English, case is realised morphologically on personal pronouns only. In the discussion, we will see that the subject function cannot be equated with the nominative case. In some contexts, accusative forms can function as the subject of non-finite verbs. Different problems related to the Case-Filter will be addressed in the seminar.
English Grammar II:
Movement and Locality
Tabea Ihsane
Summer Semester
Mon. 16-18, L-208 (Landolt)
This seminar presupposes the material taught in the first year TP, in the first year lecture and in the winter semester of the second year (English Grammar I).
The syntactic mechanism of movement is introduced in this seminar. Movement allows us to express a relation between various positions in the sentence. Consider (1).
(1) a. I will meet ten ex-students at the party.
b. How many ex-students will you meet at the party?
c. [ How many ex-students ] will you --- meet --- at the party?
By postulating movement of constituents, the sentences in (1) can be related and the parallelisms between them brought out. (1c), which is the schematic representation of (1b), shows that the direct object How many ex-students in (1b) is related to the canonical direct object position and that the auxiliary will has moved past the subject.
The analysis of further data will show that there are constraints on the type of constituents which can undergo movement and on the position these elements can move to. Consequently, a number of principles which constrain movement will be elaborated. These constraints can be defined positively or negatively: some principles enforce movement whereas others disallow movement.
During the discussion, the triggers of movement, i.e. what enforces movement of a constituent will be defined. For instance, (1) suggests that in English an interrogative constituent such as How many ex-students must undergo leftward movement. Interrogative constituents are said to be operators, they 'operate on' or take scope over the entire sentence, determining its illocutionary force, i.e. whether a sentence is a declarative, an exclamative or an interrogative.
The distance an element can move in the structure has to be defined too. While interrogative constituents may move out of declarative sentences, they cannot easily move out of indirect questions. All these restrictions on movement will be addressed in the seminar. Further locality effects will be examined as well.
English linguistics: First-Year TPs
The First-Year TPs are taught by Ms Puskas Mon. 8-10 and Mon. 10-12 Phil 006A
by Ms Forel Mon. 8-10 and Wed. 18-20 Phil 017
and by Ms Ihsane Mon. 10-12 Phil 017
The aim of the first year TPs (travaux pratiques) in linguistics is to make students familiar with the field of linguistics. Students will be introduced to the main sub-domains of linguistics:
Semantics: the study of meaning,
Morphology: the study of word formation,
Phonology: the study of sounds,
Syntax: the study of sentence structure.
Throughout the first year we will illustrate how linguistics research is done, what kind of arguments are used, what kind of methodology is adopted, what kind of results have already been achieved and what kind of problems remain.
Our main objective is that students should acquire, on the one hand, a certain content, their knowledge about linguistics, and also, more importantly, a certain number of skills in the field of linguistics. After the first year program, students will not only know about linguistics, but they should also know how to do linguistics, i.e. how to study certain aspects of English.
The approach in the first year TPs – as indeed in the whole linguistics programme – is cumulative: students acquire the contents and skills step-by-step, each step being defined as a module which specifies one objective in the acquisition of the relevant skills, associated with a set of contents.
Special attention will be paid to developing the ability to write a coherent essay on a linguistic problem, in preparation of, among other things, the demi-licence written examination and written work in general.
Objectives and contents
1. Aims and Methods of linguistics:
Objective : We develop the conception of linguistics as a descriptive science (as opposed to a set of prescriptive rules) and we show how a formal description makes explicit the speaker's intuitions about his/her language.
Contents: Semantics: analysis and classification of features
Morphology: morphological analysis of neologisms, back-formations…
Phonology: apparition of allophones in American vs. British English
Syntax: error analysis vs. prescriptive rules
2. Descriptive Tools:
Objective: This module concentrates on the acquisition and use of the descriptive tools of linguistics.
Contents: Semantics: semantic features, antonymy, synonymy, polysemy
Morphology: definition of morpheme, derivation vs. inflection
Phonology: phonetic signs, definition of phoneme, distinctive
features, syllable
Syntax: constituents, tree diagrams, inflection
3. Analysis of data
Objective: Descriptive tools acquired are put to use in the analysis of English
Contents: Semantics: ambiguity, paraphrase, presupposition, deixis
Morphology: allomorphy, suppletion, ablaut, compounding
Phonology: assimilation, connected speech, stress
Syntax: grammatical functions, word classes
4. Problem solving:
Objective: We solve a number of linguistic problems by developing a hypothesis on the basis of the empirical data and then testing it against a corpus of data.
Contents: Semantics: semantics vs. pragmatics, speech acts, deixis vs. context
Morphology: problems with compound, cranberry morphemes, productivity
Phonology: allophones, intonation, stress placement, syllable formation
Syntax: layering, transformations, the structure of the clause (IP/CP), functional category/lexical categoryEvaluation procedures
In the program each objective is represented by one teaching module. When we have finished a particular module, the acquired skills are tested by means of a number of exercises representing each of the domains studied. For the last test (concerning objective 4) students write an essay combining several sub-domains.
Travaux pratiques de syntaxe comparative
Mercredi 14h15-16h
salle A-214 (2ème étage Aile Jura)
The travaux pratiques de syntaxe are intended for first year students. Combined with the lecture course Introduction à la syntaxe they form the module AB3 of the first year program.
The first part of the seminar is dedicated to an informal discussion on general issues regarding the human language faculty (the biological basis of language, the acquisition process, specific language impairment, linguistic universals, etc). It discusses the concept of linguistics as a science and briefly introduces the theory of generative grammar. The second part consists of a series of workshop sessions on the generative approach to syntax which is presented in detail during the associated lecture course. Exercises deal mainly with French syntax, but they will occasionally bear on the comparison between different languages with respect to specific phenomena, and on the comparison between adult and child language.