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Module Content

This module introduces students to the scientific study of the structure of sentences. We ask what sort of knowledge must be attributed to someone who "knows a language" and begin to answer that question by developing some of the essential building blocks of natural language grammars.

Teaching Delivery

This module is taught by 2 x 2 hr lecture and 1 x 2 hour tutorial per week.

Indicative Topics

Indicative lecture topics are based on module content in 2023/24, subject to possible changes.

- constituent structure

- X-bar theory

- syntactic argumentation

- movement (displacement) in syntax

- the relation between structure and meaning

- the analysis of finite and non-finite clauses

Module Aims and/or Objectives

The aims of the course are: to introduce students to the scientific study of the structure of sentences; to analyse data sets and formulate appropriate generalisations that characterise them; to discover how such generalisations can be captured by abstract linguistic principles.

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By the end of the module students should be familiar with the following descriptive terminology and analytic tools of syntactic theory: word classes and grammatical categories, subcategorization, constituent structure, tree diagrams, thematic roles, grammatical function, control, raising, movement, binding, syntactic rule. At the end of the course, students will have a basic understanding of the grammatical mechanisms involved in simple declarative sentences and in questions in English and other languages. This should enable them to tackle intermediate work in syntax in term 2. Students will be able to defend their analyses by bringing diagnostic tools to bear directly and indirectly on the analysis. Students will have gained an understanding of the process of developing and defending abstract syntactic theories and will have begun developing a curious and critical stance towards novel data and theoretical claims.