Principles and Parameters in Natural Language

Overview

Introduction of the Course - What is linguistics? What is Language? - Language and Arbitrariness, Language and Dialect - E vs I Language, Language as a rule governed system - Language Faculty, Language in Human Mind - How do we learn language? - Language Acquisition - Innateness: Some Essential Concepts - Structure of Language at the Level of Sounds - Sounds (Vocal Apparatus) - Places and Manners of Articulation - Word Formation/Phonotactic Rules - Rules of Word Formation (Singular-Plural) - Sentence: An Introduction - Making of a Sentence (Components) - Grammaticality and Acceptability - Subject and Verb in a Sentence - Sentence: Objects and Verbs - Phrase Structure - X-Bar Theory

Specifier and Complement - Complements and Adjuncts - VP Components - Categorial Selections, Selectional Restrictions on verbs - Thematic Relations - Case - Morphological and Abstract Case - Structural Case - Exceptional Case Marking - Movement - Motivations for Movement - Guest Lecture: Generative Grammar by Professor B. N. Patnaik -Questions and Movement - Passives and NP Movement - NP Movement and Raising - Principles of Binding Theory - Binding Theory and NP Interpretations - Constraints on Movements - Structure of Language and Negation - Negation and Negative Polarity Items - Structure, Language, Cognition and Pragmatics