Poznan09

Introduction to Syntax (10 classes)

Omer Preminger

Consider the following thought-experiment: take human language, and strip away everything about it that can be explained in terms of constraints on sound, and in terms of constraints on meaning. Is anything left? In other words, are there phenomena in language that cannot be explained in terms of sound, or in terms of meaning?

As it turns out, once we take this question out of the realm of thought-experiments, looking instead at actual data, there is an abundance of evidence of this sort. There are sentences that we can perfectly well say (i.e., utter the necessary sequence of sounds), and whose intended meaning is entirely clear (i.e., it is a meaning that our mind is capable of representing), but are stubbornly "refused admission" into human language: speakers consistently judge these sentences as impossible in their native languages. These are the kind of phenomena that are central to the study of syntax in generative linguistics.

In this course, we will explore fundamental notions in the study of syntax. NO PREVIOUS KNOWLEDGE OF LINGUISTICS IS NEEDED, nor will any be assumed.

Some of the issues we will touch on include:

• the hierarchical organization of expressions in language
• disjoint reference effects (a.k.a., the syntactic side of Binding Theory)
• Case and the licensing of noun-phrases
• phi-features (e.g., number, person, gender), and agreement
• movement (i.e., the displacement of syntactic units)

For each of these, we will first present a sampling of the kind of data that (hopefully) convinces us that there is a phenomenon to be explained, in the first place. Then, we will present a theoretical account of these phenomena, along with some critical discussion of what works and doesn't work about this account.

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