Creating a Syntax Syllabus at the Graduate Level

How do you write a syllabus for the introduction to syntax at the graduate level (Syntax I, II)? This blog post poses some basic questions, and provides some preliminary suggestions, based on my experience in writing such syllabi over the last thirty years. I got my PhD 1993, and have been teaching Syntax I and II regularly ever since. 

Although the framework I teach is Minimalism, most of the suggestions I make below could be used for a course based on a different syntactic framework. Most of them could also be used for an introductory course in a different subfield (e.g., phonology, semantics, acquisition, etc.).

Outline: Introduction to Syntax for Undergraduates (NYU)

Here are the lecture titles for my introduction to syntax at the undergraduate level:

Table of Contents

1. Syntactic Data

2. UG and I-Langauge

3. Syntactic Categories

4. Merge

5. Constituent Structure Tests

6. Functional Projections: TP

7. Complementizers, CP and Recursion

8. DP Structure

9. Complements versus Adjuncts

10. Lexicon: Theta-Roles

11. Introduction to the Binding Theory

12. English Auxiliary Verbs

13. Head Movement (V to T)

14. Head Movement: Do-Support and Affix Hopping

15. Head Movement: Structure Dependence

16. Movement (Internal Merge)

17. Passive and Case Theory

18. VP Internal Subject Hypothesis

19. Raising and Control (Subjects)

20. VP-Shells: Double Object Constructions

21. Raising and Control (Objects)

22. Principles and Parameters

Congratulations to John David Storment on successful dissertation defense.

 Congratulations to John David Storment on his successful doctoral dissertation defense at  Stony Brook University. John David was one of our undergrads in the Department of Linguistics at NYU.  See the picture below.

Projecting (your) voice: A theory of inversion and defective circumvention

This dissertation revolves around a colloquial agreement alternation observed in several classes of English sentences with postverbal thematic subjects.

(1) a. There {was/were} no seats left c. What I love most {are/is} your outfits

b. “Moo!” {go/goes} the cows” d. In{walk/walks} several bad pirates

Using a maximally simple formulation of Agree that effectively reduces to minimal Search, I show that the aforementioned agreement alternations are derivable from a single set of syntactic operations through an optional process which I dub defective circumvention, in which a probe can conditionally Agree past a featurally deficient goal and undergo sequential multiple Agree with more than one goal, given that the features of the two goals are featurally compatible with one another.

The sentences in (1) involve A-movement of an internal argument over an argument that was externally merged in a higher position, as evidenced by the effect that the internal argument in this position has on agreement. Given the understood uniformity of the projection of arguments, as well as the locality and strict minimality of this formulation of Agree, a mechanism is needed to affect the accessibility of arguments for the creation of A-dependencies such as Agree.

As such, I demonstrate that these constructions necessarily involve inversion via smuggling, in which the internal argument is smuggled to a position above the higher argument, facilitated by phrasal movement of a verbal projection containing the internal argument, which is empirically supported by the distribution of non-argument VP internal elements in these inversion constructions. An operation such as smuggling is necessary to obviate the minimality violation that would normally occur in A-moving an internal argument over an external argument. I further show that VP smuggling of arguments is characteristic of voice constructions. Voice, then, is what allows for inversion to take place and ultimately what allows for the agreement alternation facilitated by defective circumvention.