LIN 426—Comparative Syntactic Theories

The objective of the proposed course is to offer a survey of important modern (i.e. post-1950) approaches to syntactic theory. Theoretical models to be covered include various transformationalist approaches, Head-drive Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar, and typological and functional approaches. The leading ideas of each theoretical framework will be presented, and the frameworks will be compared and contrasted with each other, both in terms of the overall models they adopt and in how they use linguistic data to support their models.