Course: Understanding Syntax: A Theory of Transformational Generative Grammar

Lecture one: Essence of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (1957)

Topic 1: Theory-Transformational Generative Grammar

Topic 2: Two aspects & concepts: Transformation & Generative

Topic 3: Recursion and Explicitness

Lecture two: Generative Syntax

Topic 1: Language-where does it locate?

Topic 2: Human mind- sophisticated translating machine

Topic 3: “I” language and “E” language

Topic 4: Generative grammar is a process theory

Topic 5: Development of generative grammar

Topic 6: Set of formal grammatical rules

Topic 7: Corpora and grammaticality judgment task

Topic 8: Universal grammar and poverty of stimulus

Topic 9: The logical problem of language acquisition

Topic 10: Underdetermination of the data

Lecture three: Syntax

Topic 1: Word orders

Topic 2: Tree diagram

Topic 3: Merge and move

Topic 4: Word categories-functional and content

Topic 5: Distribution and phrase-structure rules

Topic 6: “X” bar schema-NP, VP, AP, PP

Lecture four: Advance syntax

Topic 1: X’ schema

Topic 2: TP

Topic 3: Tests: substitution, movement coordination

Topic 4: Subcategorization

Topic 5: Complementizer

Lecture five: Surface and deep structure

Topic 1: Surface and deep structure

Topic 2: Iceberg model

Topic 3: Six-word rules

Lecture six: Field linguistics

Topic 1: Language & dialect

Topic 2: Lexical similarity and mutual intelligibility

Topic 3: Blair method- find out the difference between language and dialect

Lecture seven: Cooperative Principle

Topic 1: Grice’s Cooperative Principle

Topic 2: Conversational Maxims

Topic 3: Maxim of Quantity

Topic 4: Maxim of Quality

Topic 5: Maxim of Relevance

Topic 6: Maxim of order