Subject Area: Linguistics

This course focuses on syntax – traditionally defined as the study of the grammatical relation between words within the sentence. The course approaches the study of syntax from the perspective of generative linguistics. It explores the philosophical and methodological foundations of the generative linguistics framework with particular reference to the place of syntax in the study of the human language faculty. The course investigates a number of key theoretical constructs that attempt to account for both universal and language-specific syntactic phenomena. Topics in syntax include: recursive phrase structure rules, constituency, syntactic dependencies, transformations, and lexical relations.