Here is a list of squibs that I have written specifically for my blog, meeting the following criteria:
a. They have not appeared elsewhere.
b. They have not been submitted anywhere.
c. They are not old papers written before my blog started.
d. They are syntactic analyses, not reviews or commentary.
e. They are short.
This is the fourth in a series of blog posts showing how I think about a syntax problem when I first notice it. It is not the purpose of this series to present polished answers. Rather the intention is to present the process at it very beginning to show the kinds of initial steps that a syntactician goes through.
For these posts, I typically constrain myself to less than three hours of time to maintain the newness of the experience. Furthermore, I also try to restrain the amount of rewriting that I do, so the whole thing has a stream of consciousness feel to it.
What does it mean to be a syntactician?
The vast majority of people are not even aware that being a syntactician is an actual profession. The purpose of this blog post, and a few others that I have planned, is to familiarize the general public with the work that a syntactician does.
Without going into any specific theoretical concepts or principles, I sketch here for a general non-linguist audience the broad outlines of how a syntactician thinks about natural language.
As usual, I post a few of the ideas I have for a seminar in order to get feedback. That is, each of the following topics is a possible topic for my Spring 2026 seminar, and I need to choose one of them. The default is ‘Inversion’, but I could be persuaded to do one of the others, if there is enough interest.
1. Inversion
This course will look at a wide variety of inversion constructions cross-linguistically, including: quotative inversion, locative inversion, inverse copular constructions, subject-object inversion in Bantu, as well as other related constructions. The goal will be to show how these constructions fit into the theory of argument structure and voice of Collins (2024) (‘Principles of Argument Structure’, MIT Press) (see also Storment 2025 ‘Projection (your) Voice: A Theory of Inversion and Defective Circumvention’, Doctoral dissertation, Stony Brook). Students will be given the opportunity to do fieldwork with a consultant during the course of the semester.
2. Foundations of Minimalism
This course will discuss foundational issues in syntactic theory, including the notion of Merge, copies versus repetitions and workspaces. Discussion will focus on Marcolli (2025) (‘Mathematical Structure of Syntactic Merge’, MIT Press) and related papers (e.g., Chomsky et. al. ‘Merge and the Strong Minimalist Thesis’ CUP). By the end of the semester, students will write papers in the framework of Marcolli (2025), or write papers critiquing that framework.
3. Large Language Models and Generative Syntax
This course will review literature concerning the relationship between Large Language Models and linguistic theory. Some of the topics of interest include: (a) What is the basic architecture of a LLM? (e.g., How are vectors used for lexical representation?) (b) How are LLMs able to produce fluent and natural English text? (c) Can LLMs be taken as a possible theory of the human language faculty? (d) If not, can LLMs contribute anything useful to the study of human language? (d) Can generative syntax contribute anything useful to the creation of LLMs? Students will be expected to do projects directly investigating these issues.
Here are the links to the first three Morphology as Syntax workshops. Hopefully, the fourth will be held soon. Keep your eyes open for announcements:
MaS IV (TBA)
For convenience, I also include a link to Collins and Kayne 2023, which is the philosophical foundation of the MaS workshop series:
