Evaluation for the course
- Take-home exam: questions will be distributed during the class of February 7.
- Answers will have to be returned to me by email no later than February 15 at 23:59
- More information here.
Weeks 1-2(October 18-25)
- Skript: check later
- Required reading: Dryer, Matthew. 1995. Frequency and pragmatically unmarked word order. In Noonan and Downing (eds.) Word order in Discourse, 105--135. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Get PDF of the article here
- Additional reading (for those interested): Dryer, Matthew. 1997. On the six-way word order typology. Studies in Language 21:69--103. Get PDF of the article here
- Additional reading (for those interested): Dryer, Matthew. 1998. Why statistical universals are better than absolute universals. Chicago Linguistics Society 33:123--145. Get PDF of the article here
Week 3 (November 1)
- Slides: click here to download.
- Required reading: Haider, Hubert. 2003. How to turn German into Icelandic. Ms. Universität Salzburg.
Get the PDF here.
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Things to think about when reading Haider:
- What are the main differences between German and Icelandic?
- What is the parameter that (according to Haider) is responsible for these differences?
- A difficult problem for this analysis would be a language that has properties of both German and Icelandic. Can you think of any?
- Additional reading (very short, for those interested): Pesetsky, David. 2009. Against taking diversity at face value. Brain and Behavioral Sciences.
Get the PDF here
Week 4 (November 8)
- Required reading: Newmeyer, Frederick. 2004. Against a parameter-setting approach to typological variation. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 4, 181--234.
Get PDF here.
- Additional reading: Richards, Norvin. 2006. Beyond strength and weakness.
get PDF here
Week 5 (November 22)
Week 6 (November 29)
- Slides Get PDF here.
- Required reading: Thrainsson, Höskuldur. 2004. Object Shift and Scrambling. --- read pages 148-158 and 188-195
get PDF here
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Things to think about while reading:
- What are the differences and similarities between Object Shift and Scrambling?
- Review the Information Structure effects of Object Shift and Scrambling that I introduced on Week 5
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Additional reading: Massam, Diane. 2001. Pseudo-noun incorporation in Niuean.
Get PDF here
Week 7 (December 6)
- Slides Get PDF here.
- Required reading: Bentzen, Kristine, et al. Variation in Faroese verb placement.
Get PDF here.
- Additional reading: Baker, Mark. 2003. Building and merging, not checking.
Get PDF here
Week 8 (December 13)
- SlidesGet PDF here.
- Reading Dixon, Robert. 1994. Ergativity, Cambridge University Press.
Due to copyright reasons, I cannot upload the book here. If you want to read it, email me.
Week 9 - 10 (December 20, January 3)
- Summary: coming soon.
- Reading: Polinsky, Maria, and Eric Potsdam. 2002. Long Distance Agreement and Topic in Tsez.
Get PDF here.
- Christmas practice questions: Get the PDF here.
Week 11 (January 10)
- Reading: Harley, Heidi, and Elizabeth Ritter. 2002. Person and number in pronouns: a feature-geometric analysis.
Get PDF here. Try to read at least sections 2 and 4.
Things to think about while reading:
- How are the notions "person" and "number" decomposed into feature hierarchies?
- Which patterns of pronouns are these hierarchies designed to explain?