80-389 Natural Language Syntax
9 units, Carnegie Mellon University
This course is intended to provide an introduction to the methods of syntactic analysis, and to some major themes of contemporary syntactic theory, following up on syntactic concepts introduced in 80180, Nature of Language. A primary theme of the course is the structural constituency of a sentence, and the course will address some of the following questions. What are syntactic constituents? Do all aspects of syntax manipulate the same kinds of structural units, or do different grammatical processes rest on incompatible notions of constituency? How do other syntactic relations connect with constituent structure? To the extent that there is mismatch between different notions of syntactic structure, how can it be reconciled within a theory of grammar? These questions are engaged in through the diagnostics and techniques of modern syntactic analysis and argumentation. Those tools will allow us to explore the striking ways in which syntactic theory unifies diverse grammatical phenomena in terms of a common notion of phrase structure. The course complements 80280, Linguistic Analysis, building on but not presupposing syntactic analyses developed in that class.
Prerequisites: none listed
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