MSc Introduction to Syntax and Semantics: Syntax
Lecturer: Peter Ackema
packema@ling.ed.ac.uk.ignorethisbit
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~packema/
Aims and objectives
The overall aim of this module is to provide an introduction to theoretical syntax. The main aims of the module are to provide students with:
-- an overview of the kind of things which need to be explained by a syntactic theory
-- an overview of analyses which have been developed to explain them
-- the ability to analyse data in terms of core syntactic concepts such as constituency
We will use an online textbook for this course, namely
Beatrice Santorini and Anthony Kroch (2000), The syntax of natural language: An online introduction, to be found at:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/syntax-textbook/
(referred to as SK below)
Syllabus
Week 1
Lecture 1: Goals
-- Reading: SK chapter 1
Week 2
Lecture 2: Constituency
--
Week 3
Lecture 3: Predicates and their arguments
--
Week 4
Lecture 4: Phrase structure: verbal projections
--
Week 5
Review class
Week 6
Lecture 5: Phrase structure: nominal, adjectival and prepositional projections
--
Week 7
Lecture 6: Nonfinite complement clauses
--
Week 8
Lecture 7: Passive
--
Week 9
Lecture 8: Wh-movement
--
Week 10
Review class
Exercises
At the end of each lecture, a number of exercises from the SK textbook is mentioned. You can find the answers to these by following the links below. It is important, however, that you first try to work through the exercises by yourself, before looking up the answers, so that you get a good idea of whether you grasp a topic or not yet.
Mock exam
You can find some examples of possible exam questions here.
And here is a version of these that includes the answers
(NB! The real exam, which will last 2 hours, will have more questions than this).