Readings

Books

We will be drawing on material from two textbooks in this course, both of which are available at the campus bookstore. Liliane Haegeman's Introduction to Government and Binding Theory provides a clear and detailed presentation of many of the important theoretical proposals in the GB tradition in the 1980s. It focuses on introducing technical concepts, and focuses primarily on English. Ian Roberts' recent book Comparative Syntax focuses more on the characterization of cross-linguistic differences in the principles and parameters approach.

Haegeman, Liliane. 1994. Introduction to Government & Binding Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Roberts, Ian. 1997. Comparative Syntax. London: Arnold.

Articles, Chapters, etc.

In addition to reading material from the two textbooks, you will also read a selection of articles or chapters from the primary syntax literature. Some of these have been chosen because they are classic papers in the field, others because they provide a particularly interesting idea or dataset that bears on issues that we will be discussing in clsss. The list given below is provisional. One copy of the articles will be made available in the Syntax II mailbox in the linguistics department mailroom.

  1. Baker, M. 1988. Incorporation: A Theory of Grammatical Function Changing. University of Chicago Press. [selections]
  2. Baker, M. 1996. The Polysynthesis Parameter. Oxford University Press. [selections]
  3. Baker, M., K. Johnson & I. Roberts. 1989. Passive Arguments Raised. Linguistic Inquiry 20, 219-251.
  4. Chien, Y.-C. & K. Wexler. 1990. Children's Knowledge of Locality Conditions in Binding as Evidence for the Modularity of Syntax and Pragmatics. Language Acquisition 1, 225-295.
  5. Chomsky, N. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge: the Managua Lectures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  6. Chomsky, N. 1994. Bare Phrase Structure. In G. Webelhuth (ed), Government and Binding Theory and the Minimalist Program. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.385-439.
  7. Cole, P. & G. Hermon. 1998. The typology of wh-movement. Syntax 1.
  8. Demirdache, H. 1998. Condition C. In Atomism and Binding.
  9. Kenstowicz, M. 1989. The Null Subject Parameter in Modern Arabic Dialects. In O. Jaeggli & K. Safir (eds.), The Null Subject Parameter. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp.263-275.
  10. Lasnik, H. & M. Saito. 1991. On the Subject of Infinitives. In L. Dobrin, L. Nichols & R. Rodriguez (eds.), CLS 27. Part 1: The General Session. University of Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.
  11. Manzini, R. 1992. Locality. MIT Press.
  12. Marantz, A. 1994. A Reader's Guide to the Minimalist Program. In G. Webelhuth (ed), Government and Binding Theory and the Minimalist Program. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.351-382.
  13. Pollock, J.-Y. 1989. Verb Movement, Universal Grammar, and the Structure of Inflection. Linguistic Inquiry 20, 365-424.
  14. Reinhart, T. & E. Reuland. 1993. Reflexivity. Linguistic Inquiry 24, 657-720.
  15. Rizzi, L. 1982. Issues in Italian Syntax. Dordrecht: Foris. [selections]
  16. Safir, K. 1997. Semantic Atoms of Anaphora. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 14, 545-589.