Ling K: The many facets of restructuring (advanced!)

This course provides an overview of phenomena that have been characterized by clause reduction or deficiency of certain complement clauses. We survey and compare different approaches to clause size variation (halting structure building, exfoliation, structure removal) and evaluate them in light of the cross-linguistic distribution of complementation configurations. We look at a diverse set of languages and also provide a more in-depth study of complementation in single languages (Croatian and, if time permits, possibly others). During the course, various misconceptions of restructuring are clarified, and we suggest a universal definition of restructuring that is able to cover the variation across languages as well as different types of restructuring (size restructuring, Voice restructuring and functional restructuring).

Basic background in GB/Minimalist syntax required