24.932
Language and Its Structure II: Syntax
Introduction to fundamental concepts in syntactic theory and its relation to issues in philosophy and cognitive psychology. Examples and exercises from a variety of languages. Students taking graduate version complete different assignments.
Fall 2015
Topics
- The Hierarchical Organization of Language
- More on Building Syntactic Trees; Plus Locality Considerations; Theta-Roles
- More on Theta-Roles; Case; Basics of Binding Theory
- Binding Theory; Syntactic Movement; Embedded vs. Matrix Questions and Wh-movement
- Islands and Movement
- Verb Movement
- Verbs, Tense and Agreement
- A-Movement
- More on Movement
- The Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH)
- Empirical Arguments for PRO
- Obligatory and Non-obligatory Control
- Pro versus PRO
- Covert Movement
- Tense and Aspect
- Polysynthesis
- Conditionals
- Gerunds
- Free Relatives
Prerequisites & course information
Subject meets with 24.902 Prereq: 24.900 , 24.9000 , or permission of instructor G (Fall) 3-0-9 units
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026–2027
- MIT OpenCourseWare ↗Fall 2015
- MIT OCW calendar ↗
- MIT OCW syllabus ↗
- Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.