The three major areas of interest of the seminar will be: (i) exploring diversity in languages’ syntaxes (ii) discussing the universal constraints on grammar which determine “a possible human language”, (iii) defining the links between biology and linguistics leading to a new approach called “biolinguistics”.We will start from discussing major syntactic differences between English and Polish. Next, we will consider these differences in a wider perspective of the typology of languages. Of the variety of syntactic issues, we will talk about the relation between linearization and syntactic structure, sentence cartography, argument structure, sentence left-periphery, information structure, V2, and many others. Then, we will move on to explaining the sources of language diversity and discussing different views on parameters. We will talk about the set of mental constraints (so called “hidden texture of language”) which determine what a possible human language may be, and we will briefly refer to the prospects and the role of neuro- and psycholinguistic experimentation in uncovering this hidden texture of language. We will finally raise a few topics from the domain of biolinguistics, such as the views on language evolution or the road from Plato’s problem to Darwin’s problem. Possible BA thesis topics can include any aspect of cross-linguistic comparative syntax couched in the generative methodological framework. Other possible topics may touch upon the issues of language diversity, typology, universal constraints on language or the biological foundations of language.
- Teacher: Przemysław Tajsner