Høst 2025

HIF-3010 Syntax I - 10 stp

The course is administrated by

Institutt for språk og kultur

Type of course

This course is mandatory for students in the MA programme in Theoretical Linguistics, and elective for students in the MA programme in English Acquisition and Multilingualism. This course may be taken as a single course by students who qualify for admission to the MA programme in Theoretical Linguistics.

Course contents

This is a theoretical introduction to syntax. The course focuses on developing a theory of syntax by proposing, testing and modifying hypotheses. The ultimate goal is a universal theory which can account for both the similarities between and the differences across languages, thus comparison of data from several languages; especially the Germanic languages, will be a recurrent theme. The course starts with the basic building blocks of syntactic structure and the fundamental ways in which they can be combined. It then moves on to examine a series of syntactic phenomena, including basic constituency, selection, tense and verbal inflection, grammatical functions and case, thematic roles, clausal complementation and question formation. At each step along the way, the theory under development will be tested, expanded and revised to accommodate new data and insights.

Admission requirements

Bachelor's Degree (180 ECTS), or equivalent qualification, in a language or linguistics, or a degree combining linguistics and literature (minimum 80 ECTS in linguistics/language/literature, of which minimum 60 ECTS must be in linguistics and/or language). Applicants must have a minimum grade average comparable to a Norwegian C (2,5) in the ECTS scale.

Application code 9371 Enkeltemner på masternivå (Nordic applicants).

Objective of the course

The following learning outcomes are expected:

Knowledge:

The student having completed the course will be familiar with:

The relationship of syntax and the lexicon
Phrase structure and syntactic constituency
Structural and lexical ambiguity
The basic architecture of syntactic theory
The concept of syntactic movement
The concept of parametric variation

Skills:

The student having completed the course will be able to:

Identify phrasal constituents in sentences
Describe parametric variation between languages
Identify and explain lexical and structural ambiguity
Describe syntactic phenomena in a given language with appropriate terminology
Use syntactic tools to gain a deeper understanding of sentence structure
Discuss issues and problems in syntactic analysis

Language of instruction

English.

Teaching methods

Lectures, exercises, seminars, project work.

Quality assurance:

All courses undergo a halfway evaluation once in a 2-year period at the master's level. The board of the programme decides which courses will be evaluated by students and teacher each year.