24.960: Syntactic Models (Fall 2011)

The course has two main goals: 1. Cross-framework “literacy” • We will familiarize ourselves with two frameworks that compete with what we might call the GB/PP we want to understand how frameworks rise and fall in general, and how they have in fact risen and fallen in the history of modern syntax; we will ask ourselves questions like “what can framework X can do that framework Y cannot?”, as well as “what can they both do equally well?” ◦ in other words, we want to understand which differences between the various frameworks are notational choices, and which lead to actual differences in expressive power and empirical coverage • We will examine these questions both synchronically (for example, comparing GB/P&P/MP vs. HPSG vs. LFG) and diachronically (e.g. why did the Aspects framework give way to GB? why was the lexical decomposition component of “Generative Semantics” abandoned in the ’70s, and effectively resurrected in the late ’90s?)