Spring 2005

FR 392K • TOPICS IN FRENCH SYNTAX

Course Description

This course will be taught in French or in English, depending on the background of the participants. The course will begin with an introduction to the methods of Construction Grammar (CxG), a rapidly growing new theoretical framework for syntactic analysis being developed by Charles Fillmore and his collaborators. CxG is a non-derivational syntactic theory, which views the grammar of a language as a set of constructions. A construction is a morphosyntactic or lexical structure whose form and meaning cannot be accounted for in terms of other properties of a grammar and which therefore requires independent description. In many respects, CxG is similar to other non-derivational, unification-based, frameworks, in particular HPSG.

We will use the CxG framework to analyse a number of French constructions, from the noun and verb complex to more complex phenomena, such as left and right dislocation and different types of subordination constructions (in particular relative clause constructions). For each complex construction, we will aim at combining the formal analysis of its discourse function.

Grading Policy

TBA No final exam.

back