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.