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Hot Topics in Italian Syntax in a Comparative Romance Perspective

Vak
2015-2016

Admission requirements

Basic knowledge of syntax.

Description

This course will address some of the most debated issues in Italian and Romance syntax: clitics, null subjecthood, auxiliary selection, agreeement, unaccusativity and information structure. The topics will be addressed in a comparative Romance perspective, in order for the students to be able to appreciate the great microvariation in the Romance area.
For each topic, the students will be confronted with a number of analyses and open questions and encouraged to debate on the possible solutions, in order to learn how to shape syntactic argumentation and how to build a solid syntactic analysis. There will be miniworkshops where students will be invited to present papers on a topic, and discuss them with the rest of the class.
The reference texts are D’Alessandro, Ledgeway and Roberts, Syntactic Variation, CUP D’Alessandro, Fischer and Hrafnbjargarson Agreement Restrictions, and Ledgeway From Latin to Romance, OUP. Students will be given additional references on the topic at issue during the course.

Course objectives

Course objective 1: Students are able to understand and analyze complex syntactic phenomena.
Course objective 2: Students are able to discuss scientific literature .
Course objective 3: Students are able to develop an opinion on which analysis is preferable for given linguistic phenomena.
Couse objective 4: Students are able to formulate hypothesis on given syntactic phenomena.
Course objective 5: Students are able to present syntactic papers and defend them in front of an audience.
Course objective 6: Students are able to formulate scientific questions and interact in a conference environment.

Timetable

Ednesday 11.15-13.00
The timetable will be available by June 1st on the website.

Mode of instruction

  • Lecture

  • Seminar

  • Reading List

  • Miniworkshops

Course Load

  • time spent on attending lectures and seminars: 26 hours

  • time for studying the compulsory literature: 104 hours

  • time to prepare for the exam and/or writea paper (includingreading/research): 150 hours
    [excluding fieldwork, which might be necessary in some cases. If a student goes on fieldwork to write a final paper they will be expected to read less literature weekly]

Assessment Method

For MA students:

  • 3 workshop presentations (1/2 hour plus 15 minute questions)

  • Discussion of papers in class

For ResMa students:

  • 3 workshop presentations (1/2 hour plus 15 minute questions)

  • Discussion of papers in class

  • Final essay

Blackboard

This course is supported by Blackboard.

Reading list

The reference texts are:

  • D’Alessandro, Ledgeway and Roberts (2010), Syntactic Variation, Cambridge University Press.

  • D’Alessandro, Fischer and Hrafnbjargarson (2007), Agreement Restrictions, Mouton de Gruyter.

  • Ledgeway (2012), From Latin to Romance, Oxford University Press.

Additional references on the topic at issue during the course

Registration

Students should register through uSis. If you have any questions, please contact the departmental office, tel. 071 5272144 or mail ma-linguistics@hum.leidenuniv.nl.

Registration Studeren à la carte and Contractonderwijs

Registration via Contractonderwijs

Contact

MA Linguistics departmental office, P.N. van Eyckhof 4, room 102C. Tel. 071 5272144; ma-linguistics@hum.leidenuniv.nl.