Cinque 2005 (class exercise -- graduate Syntax I)

 Syntax I                 Fall 2025

Classroom Exercise: Cinque 2005

1. Read Cinque 2005:

Cinque, Guglielmo 2005. Deriving Greenberg’s Universal 20 and Its Exceptions. Linguistic Inquiry 36, 315-332.

2. Choose a language other than English for which you will investigate DP structure. You can use your own native language. If needed, you can do some fieldwork and consult a native speaker. Alternatively, you can find the relevant information in a good grammar. We have nine students in the class, there should be nine different languages chosen for the assignment. I want to see an interesting range of languages!

3. Provide some examples illustrating the order of the following elements (all appearing in the same phrase): Demonstrative (Dem), Numeral (Num), Adjective (Adj) and Noun (N). If possible, your set of examples should include both grammatical and ungrammatical orderings. Examples from English include: ‘those three new cars’, or ‘these four brown dogs’.

4. State the generalization governing the order of these elements in the DP. If there is flexibility in word order, describe the possible orders (and what triggers those alternative orders).

5. Using the theory in Cinque 2005, give the tree diagram for one of the examples that you found in (3). You will present your tree diagram in class on the white board on Wednesday, 

November 5, 2025.

6. Write up your results, including a discussion of any issues that came up in steps (4) and (5). The length of the write-up, including the tree diagram, should be about three pages double-spaced. It is due before class on Monday, November 10, 2025.

Note: Your language may involve classifiers, case markers and/or other elements internal to a DP in addition to Dem, Num, Adj and N.  Such additional elements are not the focus of this exercise, so just do your best to incorporate them into the tree.

Note: For part (3), your examples should be glossed and translated. Each example should have three lines (the example, the gloss and the translation, in that order). You should follow the Leipzig glossing conventions (which are standard for the field of linguistics): http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php. If you follow the Leipzig glossing rules, it will make it much easier for us to understand your data.

Guidelines for Final Papers in Syntax I (Graduate)

The students have written their proposals, and have gotten lots of feedback. Now it is time to write a final paper. These are very basic guidelines (the nuts and bolts) to help students write a research paper for Syntax I.

1. The paper should be around 15-20 pages (double-spaced) long, including references, trees and footnotes.

2. The paper is due on the last day of class, Wednesday, December 10, 2025.

3. Use Linguistic Inquiry style sheet (online). In other words, references, citations, margins and example numbering should all conform to the LI style sheet. No creative formatting allowed.

4. Your paper should be double-spaced, 12-point font, preferably Times New Roman. 

5. Avoid using footnotes. If some point is important, work it into the text. If it is not important, drop it. But if you must use footnotes, they should also be 12-point font (otherwise, I cannot read them when I print the papers off). 

6. Pages must be numbered, otherwise it is very hard to comment on the paper.

7. Your paper should have a title, author, date, institution (NYU).

8. It should also have an abstract and keywords. Writing an abstract is an excellent way to clear up your thinking on a complex topic, and to distill it into its most important points. Make it look as close as possible to a real paper that you would find posted on Lingbuzz.

9. For all non-English examples, use Leipzig glossing conventions:

https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php

10. In particular, all examples in languages other than English should consist of three lines:

Line 1: Sentence in target language

Line 2: English gloss

Line 3: English translation

11. Your paper should include a paragraph on your source of data. It should be possible for me to know where every single sentence in your paper came from. You might say: The data in this paper are the native speaker acceptability judgments of the author.

12. Write your paper for an audience that has had basic syntax (e.g., a one semester graduate introduction to syntax, or a yearlong basic undergraduate course). All concepts, terminology and principles you use should be carefully defined. For example, if you invoke Principle A of the binding theory, you need to give the definition in the paper (and the source of the definition). Don’t just assume that we all know it.

13. The basic syntactic framework for your paper should be Principles and Parameters/Minimalist Syntax. Of course, it is possible to discuss innovations and additions to this theoretical framework.

14. Please try to write a syntax paper. You will have plenty of opportunity in other classes to write phonology, phonetics, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistic or morphology papers. For example, if your analysis crucially involves the phrase ‘post-syntactic’, then you are on the wrong track. In this class, I want to see you do some syntax!

15. Your paper should include at least one syntax tree diagram, more if needed. 

16.  If you give examples illustrating your data, make sure to give minimal pairs whenever possible (whenever the data is available and a minimal pair is relevant). For example, if you claim that a sentence is unacceptable because of X, and you give an example of the unacceptable sentence, then also give the minimal pair where X is not violated.

17. Is your argumentation sound? Does C follow from A and B, or is it just wishful thinking? No handwaving allowed.

18. Golden Rule: Do not assume we can read your mind! Explain your argumentation to us. Explain your background assumptions to us. Explain individual sentences to us. Make it cognitively easy on the reader to read your paper.

Leonard Bloomfield Book Award Finalist (links)

LSA Update #319

Leonard Bloomfield Book Award Finalist

The Bloomfield Book Award Committee congratulates Chris Collins as an award finalist on his book Principles of argument structure, published by MIT Press in 2024.

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The LSA Bloomfield Book Award Committee is pleased to announce two finalists for the award. Congratulations to Chris Collins for his work, Principles of Argument Structure: A Merge-Based Approach and to George Aaron Broadwell for his work, The Timucua Language: A Text-Based Reference Grammar! 

Congratulations: Bloomfield Award Finalist (notification letter)

[with Jason's permission]

Dear Chris,

It is my great pleasure to inform you that your book, Principles of argument structure (MIT Press, 2024), has been designated a Finalist for the Linguistic Society of America's 2026 Leonard Bloomfield Book Award. On behalf of the entire Bloomfield Book Award Committee, congratulations!

You will be recognized at the Awards Ceremony at the next LSA Annual Meeting in January. This the first year that finalists are selected and honored alongside the winner, a change to the award that was proposed by this committee and enthusiastically approved by the LSA Executive Committee to go into effect immediately.

I’m cc’ing Jay Keyser as the series editor to solicit the 50-word citation that will be read at the award ceremony. Jay, you can send or arrange to have sent the citation to me, and I’ll review and edit it for the EC; we’d like to have it before November 1. (I’m cc’ing also Philip Laughlin and Angela Schmidt, who are listed in our materials as nominators from the MIT Press.)

As you know, the Bloomfield Award is the highest honor for a single work that our field possess, and its recipients, and finalists, are those works that make the most significant contributions to our science, exhibiting exemplary scholarship, empirical import, and theoretical acumen. Your book’s being named a Finalist for this award is in recognition of its excellence.

On behalf of the LSA, congratulations on this signal recognition for your contribution to our field!

With best wishes,

Jason

Jason Merchant

Vice Provost for Academic Affairs

Faculty Director, UChicagoGRAD

Lorna Puttkammer Straus Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Linguistics and the College

University of Chicago

A Singular Note on Singular-They/Them (Snippets)

Abstract: In this short snippet, I investigate verbal agreement with singular-they/them.

A Singular Note on Singular-They/Them    

Snippets

Proposal: Noam Chomsky Award (rough draft)

Noam Chomsky Award for the Scientific Study of Human Language

Purpose:

The Noam Chomsky Award recognizes individuals or groups who have made outstanding contributions to the scientific understanding of the human capacity for language. The award honors groundbreaking research that advances theoretical or empirical insight into the nature of human language. 

The award is named in honor of Professor Noam Chomsky, whose pioneering work initiated the cognitive revolution and laid the foundations of modern linguistics.

Awarding Body / Sponsor:

Presented by the Linguistic Society of America, with financial support from Google and other institutions.

Frequency:

Awarded annually. 

Monetary Prize:

US $1,000,000.

Eligibility:

There are no restrictions on the age or nationality of the awardee. The award may be conferred upon up to three recipients in cases of closely related or collaborative work. The prize is granted only to living individuals at the time of the award. There is no specific time frame for when the work was done.

Explanatory Note:

The award is intended to promote formal work in the core areas of linguistics. However, it is not restricted to these fields. Contributions from related domains—such as neurolinguistics, computational linguistics, philosophy, artificial intelligence, or cognitive science—are also eligible, provided they align with the purpose of the award.

Smuggling and Labeling Theory (with Andreas Blümel)

Abstract: This paper draws a deep connection between smuggling (Collins, 2005) and labeling (Collins, 2002; Chomsky, 2013, 2015), showing that the movement of the smuggler in a smuggling derivation can be triggered by the labeling algorithm.

https://bioling.psychopen.eu/index.php/bioling/article/view/17229