Course Description
This elementary-level course will acquaint you with some of the important results and ideas of the last half-century of research in syntax. We will explore a large number of issues and a large amount of data so that you can learn something of what this field is all about — emphasizing ideas and arguments for these ideas in addition to the the details of particular analyses. Though there are various approaches to syntax under active investigation, this class will highlight one particular approach, sometimes called Principles and Parameters syntax. Most important, the course will try to show why the study of syntax is exciting, and why its results are important to researchers in other language sciences.
Area Tags: Syntax
(Sessions 1 & 2) Monday/Thursday 10:30am – 11:50am
Location: ILC S140
Instructor: David Pesetsky
David Pesetsky is Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Linguistics and MacVicar Faculty Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his B.A. from Yale in 1977, and his Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT in 1983. Before joining the MIT faculty in 1988, he taught at the University of Southern California and at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Pesetsky’s research focuses on syntax and the implications of syntactic theory for adjacent areas of linguistic structure and language acquisition. Some of his work concerns the structure of Russian, an language of special interest, and he has done collaborative research on the syntax of music and its relation to the syntax of language. His most syntactic research develops a derivational theory of infinitivization and other clause-size phenomena. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Exfoliation: towards a Derivational Approach to Clause Size.
