Syntax at Stanford

These are notes from my grad school classes at Stanford. I have a hard time imagining they will be useful to anyone who isn't a linguistics grad student BUT maybe you are!

If you aren't, check out Emily Bender's work on Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing: 100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax.

If you're looking for some materials for undergraduate syntax, here are notes from when I TA'ed with Tom Wasow.

And how do kids choose their syntax anyhow? Here's a corpus/statistical answer.

Here are reading/course notes from my first year fundamentals class, taught by Beth Levin and Peter Sells. They include:

Barss, A. and H. Lasnik (1986) “A Note on Anaphora and Double Objects”, Linguistic Inquiry 17, 347-354.

Bresnan, J.W. (2001) Lexical-Functional Syntax. Blackwell, Oxford. Chapter 3.

Carrier, J. and J.H. Randall (1992) “The Argument Structure and Syntactic Structure of Resultatives”, Linguistic Inquiry 23, 173-234.

Haegeman, L. and J. Guéron (1999). English Grammar. Blackwell, Oxford. 199-286.

Harley, H. (2003) “Possession and the Double Object Construction”, in P. Pica and J. Rooryck, eds., Linguistic Variation Yearbook 2, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 31-70.

Levin, B. and M. Rappaport (1986) “The Formation of Adjectival Passives”, Linguistic Inquiry 17, 623-661.

Wechsler, S. (1997). “Resultative Predicates and Control”, Texas Linguistic Forum 38: The Syntax and Semantics of Predication, Department of Linguistics, University of Texas, Austin, 307-321.

Next up, some highlights from Ivan Sag's course, which include:

Chomsky, Noam. 1977. On Wh-Movement. In Peter Culicover, Thomas Wasow, and Adrian Akmajian, eds., Formal Syntax. New York: Academic Press. Pp. 71-132. (excerpts).

Levine, R., T. Hukari and M. Calcagno. (2001). "Parasitic Gaps in English: Some Overlooked Cases and Their Theoretical Consequences." In Culicover, Peter W. and Paul M. Postal (eds.) Parasitic Gaps, Current Studies in Linguistics 35. Cambridge. MA: MIT Press.

Postal, P. (2004). Skeptical Linguistic Essays. "Chapter 7: Junk Syntax 1: A supposed Account of Strong Crossover Effects."

Roberts, Ian. 1997. Comparative Syntax. Edward Arnold, London.

Ross, John R. 1967. Constraints on Variables in Syntax. Doctoral dissertation, MIT. [Published in 1986 as Infinite Syntax. Norwood, N.J.: ABLEX.] Excerpts.

Sag, Ivan A., and Janet D. Fodor. 1994. Extraction Without Traces. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Pp 365--384.

Sag, Ivan A. 2000. Another Argument Against Wh-Trace. Jorge Hankamer Webfest.

Zaenen, Annie. 1983. On Syntactic Binding. Linguistic Inquiry 14: 469-504. (excerpts).

Morphosyntax with Beth Levin:

Alexiadou, A. 2001. Functional Structure in Nominals. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Alexiadou, A. and M. Stavrou. 1998. On derived nominals in Greek. In B. Joseph, G. Horrocks, and I Philippaki-Warburton (eds.), Themes in Greek Linguistics II. John Benjamins Publishing Company. 101-129.

Baker, Mark. (1985). "The Mirror Principle and Morphosyntactic Explanation." Linguistic Inquiry, 16: 3, 373-415.

Borer, H. 1988. On the morphological parallelism between compounds and constructs. In G. Booij and J. van Marle (eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 1988. Durdrecht: Foris. 45-65.

Bresnan J. and Moshi, L. (1990). Object Asymmetries in Comparative Bantu Syntax, Linguistic Inquiry 21.2: 147-185.

Joan Bresnan and John Mugane. 2006. "Agentive Nominalizations in Gĩkũyũ and the Theory of Mixed Categories". In Intelligent Linguistic Architectures: Variations on themes by Ronald M. Kaplan, Miriam Butt, Mary Dalrymple, and Tracy Holloway King (eds), CSLI Publications, Stanford, California, 2006, pp. 201-234. (But cited here from the .PDF available on Joan's website with different numbering.)

Buell, L. and M. Sy. 2006. Affix ordering in Wolof applicatives and causatives. Selected proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference on African Linguistics, ed. by J. Mugane et al., 214-224. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Comrie, B. 1976. The Syntax of Action Nominals: A Cross-language Study. Lingua 40: 177-201.

Corbett, G. 1987. The Morphology/Syntax Interface: Evidence from Possessive Adjectives in Slavonic. Language 63: 2, pp. 299-345.

Evans, N. 2002. The true status of grammatical object affixes: evidence from Bininj Gun-wok. In Problems of Polysynthesis ed. By N. Evans and H. Sasse. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Pp. 15-50.

Harley, H. and Noyer, R. 2000. "Formal versus encyclopedic properties of vocabulary: Evidence from nominalisations" in The Lexicon-Encyclopedia Interface, ed. by B. Peeters. Amsterdam: Elsener. Pp. 349-374.

Hyman, L. 2003. Suffix ordering in Bantu: a morphocentric approach. Yearbook of Morphology, 20002, 245-281, ed. by G. Booij and J. van Marle. Great Britain: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Merlan, F. 1976. Noun incorporation and discourse reference in modern Nahuatl. International Journal of American Linguistics, 42: 3. pg. 177-191.

Mithun, Marianne. 1984. The Evolution of Noun Incorporation. Language, Vol. 60, No. 4. pp. 847-894.

Payne, Thomas. (1997). Describing Morphosyntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 8, "Voice and valence adjusting operations".

Reinhart, T. and Siloni, T. (2005). The Lexicon-Syntax Parameter: Reflexivization and Other Arity Operations. Linguistic Inquiry 36: 3, pp. 389-436.

Ritter, E. 1991. Two functional categories in noun phrases: evidence from modern Hebrew. Syntax and Semantics 25: 37-62.

Schleffer, T. 2005. Nominalization in German. Unpublished manuscript. [http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~tatjana/publications.html]

Spencer, A. 2005. Toward a Typology of 'Mixed Categories'. (Excerpt)

Tosco, Mauro. 2004. Between zero and nothing: Transitivity and noun incorporation in Somali. Studies in Language. 28: 1. pg. 83-104.

Weir, E.M. Helen. 1990. Incorporation in Nadëb. In Amazonian Linguistics, D. L. Payne (ed.), University of Texas Press, Austin.