WEEK 5
- Discussion of last week's assignment: comparison of three reviews
of Emonds & Faarlund proposal.
- One way to account for the absence/paucity of lexical borrowings
from Scandinavian in Old English: standardized (Old English) and
non-standardized (Middle English) writing practices.
- Definition of I-language and E-language. Use of
syntactically-parsed corpora in historical syntax.
- The limits to reconstructing an I-language if native speakers'
judgements are not available. In class, we discussed a few examples from Italian to
illustrate the point.
- Core notions in formal syntax: hierachical structure,
displacement properties, null categories (categories with no phonetic
content).
ASSIGNMENT:
Read Chapter 3 of
English: The
language of the Vikings.
Point out what you think are the strong points as opposed to the weak
points (with respect to any possible feature you think worth
discussing: clarity, presentation and use of the evidence, structure of
the argument, etc.).