3rd year English Minors

Introduction to Generative Grammar

Instructors: Adriana Todea, Imola-Ágnes Farkas Fall 2016
atodea@yahoo.com,
Office hours: Friday 12p.m.-2 p.m., Alpha Centre room

Syllabus
Description: We can only understand the subtleties of syntactic structures if we understand the architectonic
principles and blueprints of natural language, the rules that govern the ways in which words combine to build
phrases, and phrases are combined into larger phrases or sentences. It is also necessary to understand that syntax is
multi-layered, that phrases, after being built, can be moved or deleted in order to satisfy the correlation with the
Semantic or Phonetic modules of the language faculty. Movements and deletions take place under certain
restrictions, and speakers, without being specifically taught these conditions, have an unconscious knowledge of
them. All natural languages share the same fundamental structural properties of one universal language faculty,
property of the human brain. But these principles are broad enough to allow considerable differences among specific
languages, which enables both language variation and foreign language acquisition.

Objectives:
 To present and discuss evidence that supports the idea that language is a human biological endowment
subject to Darwinian evolution;
 To explain how phrases and sentences are constructed;
 To explain the notions language faculty and Universal Grammar;
 To give a generative description of the English syntax;
 To explain the differences in sentence structure among languages from around the world in terms of
universal principles and parameters.

Bibliography: Andrew Radford (2004) Minimalist Syntax. Exploring the structure of English, Cambridge University Press
Blake, Barry J. (1990) Relational Grammar, Routledge;
Guasti, Maria Teresa (2002) Language Acquisition. The Growth of Grammar, MIT press, Cambridge, Mass
Haegeman, Liliane (1994) Introduction to Government and Binding Theory, Basil Blackwell.
Hauser, M., N. Chomsky, and W. T. Fitch (2002) “The Language Faculty: What is it, who has it, and how did
it evolve?” in Science, 298, 1569-1579
Hornstein, Norbert, Jairo Nunes, and Kleanthes K. Grohmann (2006) Understanding Minimalism, Cambridge
University Press
Steven Pinker (1995) The Language Instinct, Penguin;
Vivian Cook & Mark Newson (1996) Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, second edition, Blackwell;
Adriana Todea (2014) PRO Control and Its Syntactic Architecture in English and Romanian, Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă
Requirements & assessment: One final written exam, testing both theoretical knowledge and practical application of
theoretical knowledge.
The printed outlines of the courses are available for you to photocopy at the library in the Generative Grammar
dossier. You are required to bring the appropriate outline at every course. You find in the outlines the content of the
slides I project, which contain the main topics and also structures and diagrams which may be difficult and time
consuming for you to copy during my lecture. They are made available to you to save time and to make note-taking
easier, but not unnecessary!
The outlines as such (without your notes covering the detailed explanations that I give during the course) cannot
constitute a sufficient source of information when preparing for the exam. If you miss a class, it is strongly
recommended that the outline be used as a guide to the bibliography covering the topics discussed.

Schedule:
DATE TOPICS
WEEK 1 Course 1: Language as an Instinct
WEEK 2 Course 2: Unaccusativity and unergativity. Multistratal syntax. The Final 1 Law.
WEEK 3 Course 3: Argument structure and theta-roles. Syntactic valence. Mappings between syntax and
semantics: The Universal Alignment Hypothesis; the Little Alignment Hypothesis
WEEK 4 Seminar 1: Argument structure and theta –roles
WEEK 5 Course 4: Nativism and child language acquisition. Plato’s problem. I-language and E-language
WEEK 6 Course 5: Darwin’s problem: language and human evolution
WEEK 7 Course 6: The structure of phrases: binary operations, binary trees, structural relations
WEEK 8 Seminar 2: X-bar theory (exercises)
WEEK 9 Course 7: The Case Filter: Feature checking, Merge! and Move!
WEEK 10 Seminar 3: Syntactic types and VP-shells
WEEK 11 Course 8: Movement in left periphery and computational configurations
WEEK 12 Seminar 4: Ditransitives, doubletransitives, subclauses and interrogatives
WEEK 13 Seminar 5: Control and raising structures
WEEK 14 Seminar 6: Floating quantifiers, position of adverbs