Course Overview and Goals
This case study focuses on an advanced undergraduate syntax class (LIGN 125: Syntax II) designed by Emily Clem and offered virtually in Spring 2021. This course is an elective for linguistics majors and the required introductory level syntax class (LIGN 121: Syntax I) is a prerequisite for enrollment. In the introductory course, students build up a formal generative syntactic model based primarily on data from English, but with some incorporation of data from other languages. Topics covered in the introductory course include basic clause structure, head movement, subject movement, raising, control, and wh-movement. The goal for this more advanced syntax course is to further develop this formal model to capture a wider range of empirical phenomena and to better approximate current theoretical approaches to syntax. Additionally, an aim is to help students develop their written argumentation skills and to teach them to begin to engage with research literature in syntax.
The goal in designing this iteration of the course was to decenter English in the classroom (see the Syntax page for more information on why this is important). While review of content from the introductory course generally used the English data that had been discussed in the previous course, all new content was introduced using data from other languages. Comparisons were sometimes subsequently made to English where useful, but English was not the primary language used in the class. Because all students in this class already had experience analyzing syntactic data from languages that they were unfamiliar with before entering this class, this approach was possible. In a course where students lack this background, data from minoritized varieties of English could be used to decenter Standardized American English while not expecting students to already know how to approach data from an unfamiliar language.
Class Sessions
The course met twice per week for 80 minutes. At least one class meeting each most weeks involved a significant in-class problem solving activity. Students were divided into breakout rooms and given data and a set of prompts to guide them. Generally problem sets were assigned in two parts. Students worked on part 1 and then the class regrouped and discussed this part of the problem with the instructor walking through a possible solution. Students then returned to breakout rooms to work on part 2 of the problem and afterward there was class discussion and the instructor walked through a possible solution with an overview of the relevance of the problem to the development of a formal syntactic model.
Below the topic of each week is listed along with the problem set that was assigned and information about what concept the problem was used to introduce. Please contact us if you would like more information about any of the problem sets.
Week 1: Review of Syntax I content
Week 2: Voice
- Problem: Japanese passives
- Theoretical significance: introduction of v
Week 3: Valency
- Problem: Shipibo applicatives
- Theoretical significance: introduction of Appl
Week 4: Case
- Problem: Icelandic ditransitives
- Theoretical significance: dative case assignment
Week 5: Agreement
- Problem: Nepali agreement
- Theoretical significance: locality in Agree
Week 6: Modalities of case assignment (reading discussion)
Week 7: Nominals
- Problem: Shona DPs
- Theoretical significance: functional structure and movement in the DP
Week 8: A-bar movement
- Problem: German clause structure
- Theoretical significance: V2 structure
Week 9: A-bar movement (cont.)
- Problem 1: Rere questions
- Problem 2: Dinka clause structure
- Theoretical significance: successive cyclicity
Week 10: Islands
- Problem: Bulgarian questions
- Theoretical significance: multiple wh-movement and islands
Assignments
There were 2 main types of assignments in the course (in addition to discussion board posts about assigned readings). Each of those is outlined below.
Problem sets: Students were assigned 3 graded problem sets during the quarter. Each problem set required the students to build on the formal model that had been developed in class to analyze new data. Students worked on these problem sets outside of class and were allowed to collaborate with classmates on the analysis. Responses took the form of short papers which students had to write independently. There were various questions that students were asked to address in their paper and they were instructed to provide structures for specific sentences from the dataset to illustrate their proposals. The first problem set was on Yaqui argument structure and valency. The second was on Hindi-Urdu case and agreement. The final problem set was on Irish questions.
Scaffolded language description and analysis project: Students selected a language to work on for the quarter based on information from a reference grammar. Students could select a language from a provided list (see this slightly modified sample list of languages and reference grammars) or could propose a different language and grammar, which the instructor screened to be sure it contained information about the domains students would be asked to investigate. Students were provided with general information about how to work with reference grammars to locate relevant information (see these slightly modified instructions for working with grammars). During the quarter students wrote 3 short papers that described particular aspects of the morphosyntax of the language. These papers did not involve formal syntactic analysis, just description. The first paper focused on valency changing strategies, the second focused on the internal structure of nominals, and the third focused on the morphosyntax of questions. As the final project for the class, students selected one of the domains that they had described to provide a formal analysis for. Students submitted a short proposal for the project and they were given feedback on the topic and proposed scope of the project. For the final paper, they were asked to describe the relevant details of the construction(s) there were analyzing (drawing on their previous descriptive assignment and feedback they had received on that) and argue for an analysis that built on the formal model that had been developed in the class.