Linguistic Variation and Universals

Catalog description

As anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows, languages differ from one another in numerous ways both superficial and profound. Although there are many different ways in which syntactic structure varies across languages, this variation is not limitless; it is subject to principled constraints, and different logically independent dimensions of variation often turn out to be highly correlated with one another. This course explores language universals and the range of cross-linguistic variation in the domain of morphosyntax, what limits this variation appears to have, and what functional, formal, and semantic principles underlie this variation.