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Principles and Parameters in Natural Language

Principles and Parameters in Natural Language. Instructor: Prof. Rajesh Kumar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras. This course offers a view of human language as a rule governed system. It will show how language is learnt and how human mind stores structure of language. This course will introduce components of linguistics theory in generative framework. Some broad topics that will be covered in this course include: Introduction to language and linguistics as a scientific domain of systematic investigation into language at the levels of sounds, words, and sentences. Nature of learning language from generative perspective; Biological Foundation of Language; Generative Foundation of Language Acquisition; Language Acquisition Device; Universal Grammar; Structure of Language around Sounds, Words, and Sentences; Constraints on Word Formation; Introduction to phonotactic constraints on word formation; Order of Words in Sentence (Subject-Object-Verb); X-bar Theory (Specifiers vs. Complements, Arguments vs. Adjuncts); Theta-Theory; Theta Role Assignment; Case Theory (Abstract, Inherent, and Morphological Case, Exceptional Case Marking, Nominative-Accusative vs. Ergative-Absolutive patterns); Raising Movement (A-Movement); Movement in Passives; A-bar-Movement (Wh-Movement, Constraints on A-bar Movements; Binding Theory (Conditions A, B, and C, Role of Structural Relationships such as C-command, Locality, Binding Domains). (from nptel.ac.in)