Assgn1

Aspects of the Minimalist Program
Introduction to the underpinning of Minimalism (Chomsky 1995,2001, 2004,205,208, 2013). We will discuss the philosophical underpinning of the enterprise and go over the the basic operations such as Merger, Agree, Labelling, Spell-out. Discussion will focus how the human language faculty interacts with the interfaces, both both on the meaning and the sound side. Phenomena such as ellipsis, movement, agreement will be explored. We will examine the relationship between semantic/pragmatic representation and syntactic form in order to establish what does it mean to claim that the language faculty is a perfect solution to the interfaces.  Participants are required to have basic knowledge of linguistics and generative grammar.