Lecture 1 Introductory Course Key notions: UG (faculty of language); I-language: intensional, internalized, mediation bet.

sound and meaning, speakers intuition, speakers competence, tacit knowledge of the language); E-language: externalized, the factor of the natural world which triggers the development of I-language through the subjects being exposed to the linguistic data; language transcended), structure-dependency, constituency tests, phrase marker(s), hierarchical structure, the principle of full interpretation; lexical and functional categories The structure of the simple sentence Aim: descriptive, explanatory: presentation of the structure. Behaviour of syntax (basic sentence patterns) The European tradition of the study of grammar: - the construction approach (Aristotle): dominance and dependency (structural relations): e.g. determiner + determined term: these apples (agreement in number) - Agreement: an inherent feature of the determined term is copied on the determiner; - Government: the main term imposes on the subordinate term a property for which the main term is not marked interpretable feature: see him (the verb imposes the case (acc); - Rigid word order (I gave him the book/I gave the book to him). - Intonation (You are pleased, arent you?) Structuralism (Bloomfield, Nida, Z. Harris): the sentence Syntax study of sentence constituency; Constituent a string with formal properties The tests for constituency: 1. substitution = any string which may be replaced by one fixed element = constituent E.. g. Mary and John/they came early. They have left the book on the table/it,there. 2. Ellipsis: Identical VPs can be omitted within sentences provided their content can be recovered from the context: John will leave for Canada but I wont [leave]. 3. Movement: preposing for emphasis reasons some parts of the S can be preposed (moved to a position higher in the sentence, to S-initial position. My students cant stand GG. GG, my students cant stand. *Grammar, my students cant stand generative. Up the hill they ran. 4. Focalized structures: Cleft and pseudo-cleft sentences (instances of Move a). 5. It is John whom he saw yesterday. //What they will have to do is go to the market.

The coordination test: Only constituents can be conjoined by coordination within a sentence. Moreover, the constituents must belong to the same class, as can be seen in the examples: a. Students who like generative syntax and inflectional morphology are rare. b. He relied on Mike and on John alike. Phrasal categories of the same type can be conjoined. * The organization of the grammar Phrase Structure Grammar String any sequence of two or more than two adjacent elements A constituent a string which has formal properties, i.e. which has internal cohesion. Sentence constituency is the central concept of syntax. It is the Grammars task to assign an analysis to any sentence, to exhibit its proper constituent structure. Category analysis is also part of the syntactic analysis (PS level of representation; each constituent belongs to spem specific syntactic category). Word-level analysis as part of the Lexicon study level of lexical representation (lexical categories, which are heads; head directionality principle: head-first, head-last). LEXICON D-STRUCTURE: PSR T-component (Move a) S-STRUCTURE PF level PF REPRESENTATIONS LF level LF-REPRESENTATIONS

The lexicon the speakers mental vocabulary/dictionary (a repository of idiosyncratic information). The lexicon contains information about the lexical and functional items. D-STRUCTURE an internal interface level where lexical properties are expressed in a form accessible to the computational system. D-Str projection of the info stored in the lexicon. The projection of the lexical properties. (theta-marked positions) Move A transformational component (Move is a last resort operation). A constituent is allowed to move if it has to check some of its features. Relations within the structure of a sentence: - Subcategorization relations (c-command, m-command), government; - Selectionaal restrictions (thematic relations: theta-grid)