Background and Rationale

This course aims at introducing students to theoretical syntax by providing a ‘historical’ account of the subject matter. Students are introduced to syntactic trees and the syntactic rules governing syntactic derivations as they were initially proposed and as they are portrait in syntactic theory nowadays. This course is a journey from flat structures to X-bar theory and bibranching leading to a unified theory of movement. Among others students will be introduced to all parts of speech, constituency, X-bar theory, binding theory, head-to-head movement, DP movement and Wh-movement.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course students should be able to:
 List the building blocks of grammatical structures in English
 Analyse structures and constructions in the nominal and in the clausal domain of English
 Analyse long-distance relations between grammatical elements in English
 Compare analyses of English grammatical phenomena
 Describe English grammatical structures as the upshot of the interaction among functional and lexical categories