ADVANCED SYNTAX

This iteration of the course "Advanced Syntax" is intended to offer the students the opportunity to acquire a comprehensive knowledge of the basic principles of syntactic research. Syntax is one of the fundamental formative disciplines of the degree program in Language Sciences. The goal of the course is to enable the student to a analyze basic syntactic structures (in particular, of his/her language of specialization), based on linguistic facts.

It is expected that the student will eventually be able to carry out individual research on a topic agreed on with the instructor.
Specifically, the student will have to:
- understand and master the analytic tools of the theory of syntax
- be able to apply the knowledge acquired in the course to the structure of languages in general, and to reflect on their properties.
- master the special terms of the discipline, which s/he should be able to illustrate clearly.
- demonstrate that s/he has acquired the tools that enable him/her to enhance his/her knowledge of the field.

What is required is a good knowledge of the various areas of Linguistics or to have passed Linguistica Generale I and II.

The functional structure of clauses (especially of nominalized embedded clauses), and of nominal phrases, with particular attention to the syntax of head-final constructions.

Readings will include the following items (additional items may be added, depending on student interest):
Baker, Mark. 2011. Degrees of nominalization: Clause-like constituents in Sakha. In Lingua 121, J. Kornfilt & J. Whitman (eds.); 1164-1193.
Bayer, J. 2009. “The Final-over-Final Constraint meets the Head-Final Filter”; handout of a talk presented at the conference on theoretical approaches to disharmonic word orders, Newcastle University.
Bayer, J., T. Schmid and M. Bader. 2005. “Clause union and clausal position”. In M. den Dikken & C. Tortora (eds.): The Function of Function Words and Functional Categories; Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Borsley, Robert D. & Jaklin Kornfilt. 2000. Mixed extended projections. In R. Borsley (ed.), The Nature and Function of Syntactic Categories, 101–131. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Cole, Peter & Gabriella Hermon. 2011. Nominalization and case assignment in Quechua. In Lingua 121, J. Kornfilt & J. Whitman (eds.); 1255-1251.
Kornfilt, Jaklin. (Forthcoming) A Predicate-Final Constraint for Head-Final Languages. Submitted to the Proceedings of the Workshop on Clause Typing and the Syntax-to-Discourse Relation in Head-Final Languages, held in May 2018, in Schloss Freudental.
Kornfilt, Jaklin. 2018a. DP versus NP: A cross-linguistic typology? In A. Vovin & W. McClure (eds.), Studies in Historical and Synchronic Altaic, 138-158. Leiden, Boston: Brill.
Kornfilt, Jaklin. 2018b. NP versus DP: Which one fits Turkish nominal phrases better? Turkic Languages 22, 155-166.
Kornfilt, Jaklin. 2018c. Turkish and the Turkic Languages. In B. Comrie (ed.), The World’s Major Languages (3rd edition), 536-561. London and New York: Routledge.
Kornfilt, Jaklin. 2012. Revisiting ‘suspended affixation’ and other coordinate mysteries. In L. Brugé, A. Cardinaletti, G. Giusti, N. Munaro & C. Poletto (eds.), Functional Heads: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, vol. 7, 181–196. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kornfilt, Jaklin. 2011. The sentential subject constraint/CED as a left-dislocation constraint in Turkish. In A. Simpson (ed.), Proceedings of WAFL 7, 203–220. Cambridge, MA: MITWPL.
Kornfilt, Jaklin. 2005a. Asymmetries between pre-verbal and post-verbal Scrambling in Turkish. In J. Sabel & M. Saito (eds.), The Free Word Order Phenomenon: Its Syntactic Sources and Diversity, 163–179. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Kornfilt, Jaklin. 2005b. Agreement and its placement in Turkic non-subject relative clauses. In G. Cinque & R. Kayne (eds.), Handbook of Comparative Syntax, 513–541. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kornfilt, Jaklin. 2003. Scrambling, subscrambling, and case in Turkish. In S. Karimi (ed.), Word Order and Scrambling, 125–155. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Kornfilt, Jaklin. 1996. On copular clitic forms in Turkish. In A. Alexiadou, N. Fuhrhop, P. Law & S. Löhken (eds.), ZAS Papers in Linguistics 6, 96–114. Berlin: ZAS.
Kornfilt, Jaklin & John Whitman. 2012. Genitive subjects in TP nominalizations. In G. Iordachioaia (ed.), Proceedings of JeNom 4 Working Papers of the SFB 732, 39–72. Stuttgart.
Kornfilt, Jaklin & John Whitman. 2011. Afterword: Nominalizations in linguistic theory. Lingua 121(7). 1297–1313.
Kornfilt, Jaklin & Nadezhda Vinokurova. 2017. Turkish and Turkic complex noun phrase constructions. In B. Comrie, Y. Matsumoto & P. Sells (eds.), Noun Modifying Clause Constructions in Languages of Eurasia: Reshaping Theoretical and Geographical Boundaries, 251-292. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Krapova, Iliyana & Guglielmo Cinque. 2012. Finite clausal “complements“ of nouns as non-restrictive reduced relative clauses. Handout of talk presented at FASL 12, Bloomington, Indiana University.
Miyagawa, Shigeru. 2011. Genitive subjects in Altaic and specification of phase. In Lingua 121, J. Kornfilt & J. Whitman (eds.); 1265-12

The extent of the knowledge acquired by the students of the topics covered in the course will be evaluated through class discussion as well as during a discussion of an oral presentation at the end of the course. In addition, a research paper will be submitted by each student, on a topic related to those studied during the course. All of these components will be assigned a specific mark for a total of 30/30 (and distinction).

Conventional (oral presentation).

No further information.

written and oral