Course announcements in this post:<\/p>\n
This class will explore what is known and what is unknown about the in<\/span>ternal and external\u00a0syntax<\/span>\u00a0of nominals. We chose the term “nominals” rather than “NP” or “DP” because the headedness of nominals is\u00a0in<\/span>\u00a0fact a topic of continual debate — a remarkable lack of scientific consensus for such a basic question concerning one of the fundamental building blocks of human language.\u00a0In<\/span>\u00a0contrast to the verbal domain, where there is also debate but also significant (justified) consensus, many other fundamental aspects of nominal\u00a0syntax<\/span>\u00a0remain deeply puzzling. What functional elements enter\u00a0in<\/span>to their maximal extended projections, and how closely (if at all) does their arrangement parallel what is found\u00a0in<\/span>\u00a0the verbal domain? What can nominalized clauses such as gerunds reveal about the parallels and non-parallels between nominals and clauses? Do nouns take complements analogous to complements of verbs, prepositions, and adjectives? Where do relative clauses fit\u00a0in<\/span>to the picture, and what laws govern the\u00a0syntax<\/span>\u00a0of modification more generally? Is concord within the nominal an\u00a0in<\/span>stance of Agree or something else? How should we understand constructions seemingly special to the nominal domain such as construct state, polydefiniteness, and others?<\/p>\n Our plan for the beginning of the semester starts as follows, probably one class per topic:<\/p>\n The headedness of nominals<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Gerunds<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Construct State<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n \u0097 and then we will be off and running.<\/p>\n Course requirements:<\/strong>\u00a0active attendance and participation, meetings with\u00a0in<\/span>structors to develop final paper, final paper<\/p>\n 24.967: Topics in Experimental Phonology<\/strong><\/p>\n The field of phonology has increasingly looked to experimental results to confirm and extend its understanding of phonological patterns. In this\u00a0course<\/span>, we will examine some of the issues involved in deriving experimentally testable predictions from a theory, designing and running an experiment, and interpreting the results.<\/p>\n The class has several goals:<\/p>\n The emphasis this year will be on statistical analysis. The\u00a0course<\/span>\u00a0will be organized around the statistical models that are most applicable to linguistic experiments:<\/p>\n The application of these models will be illustrated through case studies selected based on the interests of the participants. Candidates include: Coarticulation, perceptual similarity, the P-Map Hypothesis, statistics of the lexicon, wug\/blick tests and Universal Grammar\/learning biases. Experimental paradigms examined are likely to include production, perceptual identification and discrimination, artificial language learning, and acceptability judgments.<\/p>\n Requirements for students taking the course for credit:<\/strong><\/p>\n Anaphora and presuppositions have been at the frontier of semantic inquiry for a long time, with Heim (1982) dissertation, presenting a sweeping and largely unified view of these two phenomena, with consequences for the syntactic theory of Logical Form. Much of the subsequent work on these topics over the past 40 years have been developments in reaction to Heim\u0092s work, but in much of this work anaphora and presupposition have been treated separately. These two topics are intertwined, furthermore, with that of indefinites which have peculiar scopa; and anaphoric properties that sets them aside from other quantificational noun phrases.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In the present\u00a0seminar\u00a0we will explore various issues pertaining to variable binding, anaphora and presupposition with the hope that they might end up bearing on the general question of the unification propsed in Heim\u0092s dissertation.<\/p>\n Requirements.<\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Course announcements in this post: Topics in Syntax (24.956) Topics in Experimental Phonology (24.967) Topics in Semantics (24.979) 24.956: Topics in Syntax Modeling phonological typology Instructor: Sabine Iatridou, Elise Nerman, David Pesetsky Time: Monday, 2pm-5pm Room: 32-D461 This class will explore what is known and what is unknown about the internal and external\u00a0syntax\u00a0of nominals. We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-classes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17774"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17777,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17774\/revisions\/17777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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