The Syntax/Semantics Interface Cross-linguistically

(4 Credits)

In many languages of the world, the topic and the focus of the sentence, the scope relations among quantifiers and negation, and the role of the speaker and addressee are made transparent by word order and various suffixes on the verb. Studies data from languages from Hungarian to Kathmandu Newari from the perspective of theoretical linguistics and asks what they tell us about how the syntax/semantics interface works in universal grammar.