LING403-13W (C) Whole Year 2013

Syntactic Theory

30 points

Details:
Start Date: Monday, 18 February 2013
End Date: Sunday, 10 November 2013
Withdrawal Dates
Last Day to withdraw from this course:
  • Without financial penalty (full fee refund): Friday, 1 March 2013
  • Without academic penalty (including no fee refund): Friday, 30 August 2013

Description

Current issues in generative syntax.

Comparative syntax is the study of syntactic differences between languages. Its aims are to identify core properties that all languages have in common, and to provide a theoretical account of the ways in which the syntax of one language or variety may differ from that of another. This course offers first-hand experience of comparative syntactic research, and provides students with the practical skills and theoretical knowledge needed to pursue more advanced studies in the field.
We will decide as a class, which syntactic topics we would like to focus on, and we will spend the first semester reviewing some of the existing literature on the class topics. This year we are particularly lucky to have Professor Richard Kayne from New York University teaching into the class in Term 1. This means that we have the unique opportunity to read some of Richard’s work on comparative syntax together and discuss it with him in the first four weeks of the course.
In the second semester, our weekly sessions will be dedicated to discussions and readings that are directly relevant to the topics and languages that the individual course participants decide to do their research projects on.
Throughout the year, every student will collect and analyse relevant data from a language of their choice, and we will use our weekly meetings to compare these data and discuss their implications for the theoretical approaches presented in the readings. While individual student projects are likely to focus on data from one language, we will also consider how the approaches we discuss can account for the cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the data we have amassed as a class.

Learning Outcomes

  • Through their experiences with this course, students are anticipated to be able to:
  • read and critically evaluate existing work on syntactic theory and comparative syntax
  • work both independently and collaboratively to identify and compare patterns found in syntactic data from different languages
  • formulate and test hypotheses on the basis of patterns in observed and elicited data
  • draw on existing approaches to develop a theoretical account of the observed generalisations
  • communicate their findings effectively, both orally and in writing
  • put together a well reasoned and clearly structured paper on a syntactic topic

Prerequisites

Subject to approval of the Programme Director.

Course Coordinator

Heidi Quinn

Assessment

Assessment Due Date Percentage 
Data Collection 10%
Critical Review 30%
Oral Presentation 10%
Written Assignment 50%


Data collection - throughout the year
Critical review - due early in Term 3
Oral presentation - due early in Term 4
Written assignment - due at the end of Semester 2

Textbooks / Resources

There is no set text for this course. Copies of relevant readings will be distributed in class.

You are encouraged to check out Richard Kayne’s publications on the following website: http://linguistics.as.nyu.edu/object/RichardSKayne.html

Course links

Library portal
The course outline is available on LEARN (only for students enrolled in this course).
LEARN

Indicative Fees

Domestic fee $1,562.00

* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.

For further information see Language, Social and Political Sciences .

All LING403 Occurrences

  • LING403-13W (C) Whole Year 2013