Linguistics 220B:
Crosslinguistic Syntax

Joan Bresnan
Jordan 022
ph: 723-0144 em: bresnan@stanford.edu

Background: This course was originally designed by the Syntax Faculty (Bresnan, Sag, Sells, and Wasow) in direct response to student requests in 1991 for a typologically oriented graduate course on theoretical syntax. The members of the syntax faculty rotate in teaching this course from year to year, and the list of topics has evolved and is varied in response to experience and student interest each year.

Goals: The purpose of the course is to expose students to typologically diverse syntactic phenomena that pose challenges to contemporary syntactic theory. The course is intended to draw on accessible readings from diverse perspectives rather than to develop a single coherent theoretical approach. A subsidiary goal is to get students immediately into reading original contemporary sources in diverse frameworks, so they can learn how to extract the important linguistic ideas and intuitions from the various technical constructs used in the syntax literature.

Requirements: One or more class presentations and a written term paper.

Reading list: The reading list is selective but still too ample for full discussion in a single quarter. The basic strategy will be for students to divide the readings under each topic. The unstarred readings are to be read by everyone.

Special instructions for January 6, 1998 meeting. Because I will be in Los Angeles for the LSA Meeting on January 6, I would like you to do the following as your first assignment:

1. Everyone should read the Broschart, Dixon, and Schachter papers under ``Languages without Nouns or Verbs'' and makes notes for discussion.
2. Three students should volunteer to prepare presentations of these three papers (one each) at our next meeting (Wednesday, January 13). The presentations should outline what you find interesting and surprising about the paper, what you disagree with, how you would resolve conflicts between this paper and others in the reading (or elsewhere).
3. Copies of the three papers will be available for photocopying in the Ling. 220B box in MJH in the printer/public terminal area under the student mailboxes.
4. On January 13, we will choose which topics to take up next, and which students would like to work on making the next class presentations.

• Languages without Nouns or Verbs?
• Serial Verbs
• Subject, Topic, or None of the Above
• Ergativity
• Pronoun Incorporation
• Noun Incorporation
  • Syntactic Approaches
  • Lexical and Lexico-syntactic Approaches
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