Linguistics 611 Spring 2013

Review Paper assignment

Due 4/9

In no more than 10 double-spaced pages, review an article in minimalist syntactic theory. Summarize the major arguments and show precisely what the author was trying to account for and how the account was intended to work. Do not simply repeat what the author said. Instead, try to digest it and restate it in your own terms. Also, do not feel you have to cover everything in the article. Decide what seems most significant and discuss that. Make sure to relate some of your discussion to the concepts, theories, and analyses we have examined in class. If possible, also present some additional data that could be handled by the proposals in the article. Or briefly discuss some phenomenon that seems to contradict the proposal of the article. Here are some articles that are closely related to things we have been or will be discussing in class:

Bobaljik, Jonathan, and Dianne Jonas. 1996. Subject positions and the roles of TP. Linguistic Inquiry 27: 195-236.
Bošković, Željko. 2007. On the locality and motivation of Move and Agree: An even more minimal theory. Linguistic Inquiry 38: 589-644.
Nevins, Andrew. 2004. Derivations without the Activity Condition. In Perspectives on Phases: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 49, eds. Martha McGinnis and Norvin Richards, 283-306. Cambridge, MA: MITWPL. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT, MA: Cambridge.