Thinking Syntactically

In school, we all learned from our teachers the rules for writing properly in our language. But are \ud there\ud rules underpinning how sentences are formed that are not taught? Have you ever wondered why it is \ud in\ud English that one has to say zero children, not zero child? That is, why mark plurality on a noun \ud when the modifier zero clearly indicates there is no plurality? You may be surprised to hear that \ud What type of English did he say did she speak? is a well-formed sentence. Well, it is, at least in \ud the English spoken in Belfast, Northern Ireland. As for words like at and with, which appear BEFORE \ud the noun as in at home and with a hammer, their counterparts appear AFTER the noun in Japanese, so \ud what is called pre-position in English is actually post-position in another language.\ud \ud So should we assume that each language follows its own rules or do we have reason to believe that \ud human languages share some fundamental principles, not just for communicative purposes, but \ud principles applying at the level of sentence formation? These are the questions we will tackle in \ud LING100 Thinking Syntactically, where we will examine raw data and build a syntactic theory, namely \ud a theory on sentence structure, from the ground up. We will arrive at a fairly sophisticated \ud theoretical model within which you will tackle a specific syntactic issue of your choosing, be it \ud English or any language.\ud \ud This course is a hands-on investigation of sentence structures in human language. This is a \ud participation intensive course. Collectively, the class will develop an increasingly complex \ud syntactic theory starting\ud with some basic theoretical assumptions and continuing to test where the assumptions \ud lead by\ud examining large amounts of data. In the process, students will learn to observe syntactic patterns, \ud make\ud generalizations, and test hypotheses