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University of California, Los Angeles |
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Course Descriptions |
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Introductory Syntax. An introduction to the
methodological foundations of syntactic inquiry, focusing on diagnostic tools
(distributional criteria, constituency tests, binding theory, etc.) and forms
of argumentation (hypothesis-testing, analogy, parsimony, etc.). A theory
emerges from the application of these tools to a variety of languages, but
the focus of this class is on the relationship between data and theory, not
on the theory itself. Advanced Sytax. A detailed review of the current theory
of syntax in the Principles and Parameters framework. Introductory Semantics. An examination of the
relationship between the structure of linguistic expressions and their
meaning. It introduces the elementary components of a model-theoretic theory
of meaning for human language. It covers topics in semantic composition
(function application, modification and quantification) and lexical semantics
(theta theory and aspect). Advanced Semantics. A survey of four tools for semantic
analysis, namely intensional logic, discourse representation theory,
situation theory, and generalized quantifier theory. It explores their
relation to current issues in semantic and pragmatic theory, and their
relation to an overall picture of what meaning is and how it is encoded in
natural language. Historical Linguistics. An introduction to the study and classification
of the kinds of changes languages undergo diachronically. It focuses on the
theoretical formalization of patterns in phonological and syntactic change
(in a variety of languages) with the aim of folding language change into a
theory of language in general. Field Methods. A survey of techniques in the acquisition
and organization of primary data from an unknown language. Structure of Arabic. An examination of contemporary
phonological, morphological and syntactic theory in the particular light of
the intricacies of the Arabic language. It pays special attention to certain
Arabic-specific constructions like templatic morphology, subject-verb
agreement asymmetries, the distribution of resumptive pronouns, and the
construct state. Introduction to Linguistics. A general introduction to
the scientific study of the organizational principles of human language. The
course covers methods of linguistic description and analysis in the five core
areas: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, with
exemplification from a wide variety of languages. Listed below are descriptions of some graduate level seminars in selected
topics I have taught recently. Seminar on Aspect, Case and Quantification. An
investigation of 'linking', both of a Case to a theta-role and of a
quantifier to a Case. It investigates how similar these processes are, and to
what extent they are both restricted by the aspectual character of the
predication they occur in. Related theoretical issues are treated, including
the question of to what extent movement is involved in various kinds of
linking configurations, and the related issues of (1) the nature of covert
movement, and (2) how movement chains are interpreted in copy theory and
other approaches to chain formation. Seminar on Aspect and (In)definiteness at the Syntax-Semantics Interface. A predicate's aspectual type commonly affects the definiteness or specificity of NPs related to that predicate, as in 'definiteness effect' contexts or interactions of the Finnish kind where Case is involved (for one verb class, object Case marks definiteness, for another it marks predicate aspect). The proper analysis of these phenomena is bound up with the question of whether definiteness and specificity, and for that matter Case, are 'scope' phenomena, i.e. correlated with syntactic configurations, for this tells us how syntactic the interactions with aspect are. Further, the question of just exactly what we mean by 'definiteness' and 'specificity' and whether these terms can be defined language-independently is an important preliminary question. In this seminar we investigate what definiteness and specificity are, whether they can be appropriately characterized as scope phenomena, and then attempt to address the question of what explains their mysterious attraction to aspectual alternations. Seminar on Subjecthood. Syntactic theory has witnessed the gradual disintegration of the traditional Government-Binding characterization of subjecthood--that tense, nominative case, agreement, and hierarchical prominence including controllability are mutually dependent properties with a single syntactic locus: INFL/T. Research on case-bearing or agreement-triggering PRO in Greek and Portuguese, and oblique subjects and nominative objects in Icelandic and various ergative languages has led to the demise of a unified notion of "subject configuration". In response, structural constraints on case assignment and agreement have loosened considerably to relations (e.g. Agree) that do not require structural adjacency and that are established under conditions relativized to the syntactic context. This seminar seeks to determine whether the various properties associated with subjecthood can in fact be said to have absolute and universal configurational correlates, i.e., whether a configurational notion of subjecthood, or at least the various subject properties individually, can be recouped from the facts that seemed to undermine it. |
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