Week by week:
Jan. 31 Overview and survey.
Pruning: Ross Pruning paper; Ross thesis chapter; Perlmutter thesis chapter; Chomsky Syntactic Structures pp. 70-71 (about Affix Hopping adjacency, and hidden pruning?), Handout on verbal morphology, including an early Minimalist account of adjacency
Feb. 7 Continue Jan. 31 readings. We will focus on: Affix Hopping adjacency, and Minimalist attempts to eliminate it; Ross Ch. 3 discussions of NP complexity requirements as output conditions and of clitic climbing; and Perlmutter's classic analysis of that-trace effects.
Feb. 14 Continue Feb. 7 readings and add Rivero 1970 (esp. pp.642-643 on Spanish clitic climbing) and Quicoli 1976 (an early account of clitic climbing in terms of the Specified Subject Condition).
Feb. 14 Time to finally finish discussions of clitic climbing and that-trace effects.
Feb. 21-28 We will definitely finish clitic-climbing, including Quicoli's EQUI proposal. [Rizzi on restructuring alternative.] Here's a note by Barbara Partee about quantifier problems for EQUI type rules. And here's a reference to Geach confirming a conjecture of Partee's. Then on to Perlmutter on that-trace. Perlmutter's 1971 discussion of Comp-trace repair.
March 7 Finish that-trace. On to Postal's 'quasi-clauses' (effects of pruning without pruning): Postal On Raising pp.92-93, 174-176, 228-240.
March 13 No class. Snow day.
March 20 No class. Spring break.
March 27 Islands, Subjacency, and ways of weakening barriers. Lasnik and Uriagereka (2005), sections 3.6 and 3.10. HO on Subjacency. [Guest lecturer Juan Uriagereka.]
April 4 Weakness of infinitival embedded questions, and extensions of this phenomenon. Ross thesis pp. 19-22; Grano&Lasnik ms.
Start thinking about your term paper. Any topic with any connection to things we have been looking at or will be looking at in class. Proposal due Monday April 3. (A page or 2 sketching the phenomenon you will be writing about, and, where relevant, giving some bibliography.)
April 11 Continue April 4 readings. Also, you might want to take a look at the 2 Chomsky stories on parasitic gaps: Chomsky 1982 Ch.s 3 and 4; Chomsky 1986 Ch. 10.
April 18 We will finish looking at parasitic gaps, esp. the Chomsky 1986 account. Other phenomena showing infinitival weakening and bound pronoun effect: Family of questions readings in Wh-Q interactions; Multiple questions; Tough movement and its kin. See Grano&Lasnik ms and Arizona HO.
April 25 Lots more bound pronoun effect phenomena, and the beginnings of a theory. Continue April 18 readings. HO on multiple slucing.
May 2 Student presentations: Nick, Gesoel
May 9 Student presentations: Suyoung, Rodrigo
May 16 Papers due (send me a pdf)
Tuesday 3:30-6:00
MMH 1401G
1106 Marie Mount Hall
<lasnik [AT] UMD [DOT] edu>
(301) 405-4929
Office hours:
Tuesday mornings
Wednesdays
Thursdays until about 4:00 pm
Course description
A critical examination of the history of syntactic analyses involving tree pruning, clause reduction, quasi-clauses and related phenomena.
We will be looking at several ways of eliminating or reducing syntactic structure, including:
-Work of the 1960's, especially by Ross, on ‘tree pruning’ including its involvement in the earliest detailed treatment of that-trace effects (by Perlmutter)
-Postal 1974 rejection of pruning in favor of 'quasi-clauses'
-'Clause-mate' restrictions, and exemptions (first via the Chomsky 1973 replacement of clause-mate by TSC and SSC)
-‘Sˈ deletion’ of LGB and its effects for Case, Binding, and movement, and how it has been formalized
-'Restructuring'
-'Bound pronoun effect'
Grano&Lasnik ms.
Tentative course requirements
A class
presentation
Term paper