Course announcements in this post:
- More Advanced Syntax (24.955)
- Topics in Syntax (24.956)
- Topics in Semantics (MIT 24.979/Harvard LING 207R)
- Topics in Computational Phonology (24.981)
24.955: More Advanced Syntax
- Instructor: Elise Newman & Sabine Iatridou
- Wednesdays, 10am-1pm
- Room: 32-D461
This class is a requirement for the syntax specialization and strongly recommended for those interested in the syntax-semantics interface.
It explores many topics, all of which have the property that they have not been taught in the 24.951/24.952 classes of the previous two years. Each topic will be covered in at most two class sessions. Registered students will be required to write three snippets. The first snippet has to be on a topic taught in the first 4 weeks, the second on a topic of the second 4 weeks, and the third on a topic taught in the last 4 weeks.
The topics we plan to cover include (subject to change):
- The Plural Pronoun Construction
- Polydefiniteness
- Allocutive agreement
- Asymmetric coordination
- Puzzles about the perfect
- Temporal adverbials
- Syntax of comparatives
- Expletives
- Ergativity
- V-initial languages
- Ne-que construction
- Imperatives
- Selection/subcategorization
- NP ellipsis and ne-cliticization
- Long distance agreement
This class is offered biannually, so if you are considering taking it, please note that the next time it will be offered will be in the ’26-’27 academic year.
24.956: Topics in Syntax
- Instructors: Peter Grishin & David Pesetsky
- Mondays, 2-5pm
- Room: 32-D461
Passive constructions occur in approximately 44% of the world’s languages (World Atlas of Language Structures, Siewierska 2013). Passives are characterized by a number of apparently distinct co-occurring properties, e.g. agent demotion, theme promotion, an existential interpretation of non-overt agents, etc. What abstract syntactic building blocks generate constructions with these properties, and why should they so often co-occur?
In this class, we’d like to approach this issue by taking as our starting point the issue of implicit arguments, with passives (and related constructions) as a key empirical testing ground. Following Bhatt and Pancheva (2017), we use the term “implicit argument to refer to things like the implicit agent of (short) passives, null objects (in certain languages), and implicit arguments of nouns and adjectives. While there is somewhat of a consensus on the syntactic reality of null/silent elements like pro, PRO, traces/copies, and ellipsis sites, there is much less consensus on the syntactic reality of implicit arguments, with an influential view treating them as “syntactically active elements that nevertheless do not occupy a syntactically projected position” (Bhatt and Pancheva 2017:2). Of course, views vary.
We plan to first survey some of the literature on implicit arguments (so for a while, you will think that this is mainly a class on them)— and then turn to a detailed case study of passives, both canonical and noncanonical.
MIT 24.979/Harvard LING 207R: Topics in Semantics
- Instructors: Athulya Aravind & Kathryn Davidson
- Thursdays 9:45-11:45AM
- Room: Harvard Boylston 303; MIT 32D-461
Experimental methodologies have increasingly been employed within the field of linguistics to collect data in service of theory building, especially understanding points of variation across languages, understanding the process of language acquisition, and understanding how linguistic representations interact with other aspects of cognition. In this course we’ll survey the field of experimental semantics and its interfaces with syntax and with pragmatics with an eye toward giving students coming in with foundational graduate-level background in theoretical linguistics a framework for reading current experimental literature in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and for developing their own experimental designs. We plan to explore experimental and developmental case studies from well-established areas of formal semantics, including presupposition and anaphora, connectives, quantification and modality, with the possibility of incorporating additional topics based on student interests.
24.981: Topics in Computational Linguistics
- Instructor: Adam Albright
- Tuesdays, 2-5pm
- Room: 32-D461
Computational modeling can usefully inform many aspects of phonological theory. Implementing a theory provides a more rigorous test of its applicability to different data sets, and requires a greater degree of formal precision than is found in purely expository presentations. By training models on realistic training samples, we can test whether a posited analysis can actually be learned from representative data, and we can observe what proportion of the data is actually accounted for by that analysis. Modeling also provides a direct means of testing whether a proposed formal device facilitates the discovery of generalizations, or whether it hampers learning by greatly increasing the size of the search space. Finally, modeling has played an increasingly important role in modeling gradient experimental data, since it provides a way of comparing human behavior with statistical properties of linguistic input, filtered through a possibly non-trivial learning procedure.
This class is intended to provide an introduction to the theory and practice of computational models of phonology. We will discuss recent theoretical work informed by computational implementations, and tools for modeling phonological knowledge of various kinds. Special attention will be paid to the relation between formal learning models and empirical data concerning early phonological acquisition.