Because of the small number of students which take this course and who have varied backgrounds in linguistics, specifically syntax, the course is run as a ‘readings-based’ study tailored to the students’ needs and interests. If the student has virtually no background in Theoretical Syntax, and advanced textbook, such as Haegeman (1994), will be used as a springboard for initiating an interest in a more specific area in syntactic analysis which can then be followed up with focussed study based on relevant and more recent journal articles. For those students who already have some knowledge of Syntactic Theory, a more focussed approach can be adopted from the start, depending on the student’s interests or perhaps covering gaps in their knowledge. A selection of the readings the course has covered in the past is given below. The assessment for the course is based on an end of term paper in which the student selects a particular topic covered in the readings which critiques the proposed analysis and develops it on the basis of new data that the student introduces.

List of potential readings:

• Dowty, David R., Robert E. Wall, and Stanley Peters. Introduction to Montague Semantics. D. Reidel, 1981.
• Grimshaw, Jane B. 1997. Projection, Heads, and Optimality. Linguistic Inquiry, 28(3): 373–422.
• Haegeman, Liliane. 1994. Introduction to government and binding theory. Oxford, UK; Cambridge.
• Halle, Morris and Alec Marantz. 1993. Distributed Morphology and the Pieces of Inflection. In: K. Hale, & S. Jay Keyser, (Eds.). The view from building 20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 111–176.
• Marantz, Alec. 2008. Case and Licensing. In Erik Reuland (ed.), Arguments and Case: Explaining Burzio’s Generalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 11–30.
• Mark C. Baker. 2015. Case: Its principles and parameters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Siddiqi, Daniel. 2006. Minimize Exponence: Economy Effects on a Model of the Morphosyntactic Component of the Grammar. PhD Thesis. University of Arizona.
• Starke, M. 2010. Nanosyntax: A short primer to a new approach to language. Nordlyd, 36(1): 1–6.