MSc in Applied Linguistics: Syntax

Autumn 2001/2002

Caroline Heycock

Possible essay topics

Below are some suggestions for essay topics. But you are invited to think of your own, depending on what you are most interested in. Whatever you decide on, please email me with the title and a few sentences saying what you are going to write about, as soon as possible, and certainly no later than the end of Week 10.

• An obvious kind of topic that would be appropriate would be an analysis of some aspect of syntactic structure in another language that we have looked at in English. For example:
  • The structure of noun phrases. In particular, what is the syntax of possessives? Or the position of the various types of modifiers (adjective phrases (and there may be subclasses of adjectives that behave differently from each other), relative clauses, prepositional phrases, etc).
  • Is there any evidence for a difference in the syntax of "main verbs" and any other kind of verb (e.g. modals, aspectual auxiliaries, etc)?
  • Does the language have verbs or adjectives that allow "subject raising" of the kind that we saw in English ("seem", "appear", "tend", "likely", etc). What is the evidence?
  • Does the language have verbs or adjectives that behave like "try" etc in taking an infinitival complement with a PRO subject? What is the evidence?
  • Does the language have non-finite clauses at all? If so, do they have the same kind of distribution as they do in English? If not, what is the syntax of expressions that would be expressed as infinitives in a language like English.
  • Give an analysis of the basic structure of the clause (for example, is it head-final or not? what about the order in the VP? etc)
  • Are there constructions in the language that you would analyse in terms of movement? Why, or why not?
  • What is the syntax of questions in this language? Is it similar to English, or quite different?
• What are the constructions possible with "perception verbs" in English? E.g. what analysis could you give for examples like "I saw them leave" "I saw them leaving" "I saw that they had left" etc.
• How can the passive be analysed? This is a topic that is addressed in a chapter of the text that we didn't read; you can use that as your starting point.
• If you have experience of teaching English to native speakers of another language, or of learning a language other than your first language, what aspects of the syntax of the second language have proved most difficult to teach/learn?