Abbreviations

For more information about the lecture halls and seminar rooms, see our lecture room page. The names listed under "Technical Assistance" are student volunteers who will act as a contact person for technical questions of the lecturers and workshop speakers during the course or workshop.

What syntax feeds semantics?

At what level of syntactic representation does semantic interpretation apply? A dominant trend in the last 25 years defends the existence of a covert, after-spell-out level of representation, Logical Form (LF), that mediates between surface syntax and the semantic component. It is argued that units of meaning are compositionally computed from this intermediate syntax. However, most of the original empirical reasons for the existence of LF have been challenged, and, for many phenomena commonly attributed to LF, alternative accounts exist that derive the semantics from the surface syntax in a direct compositional way. The course will survey the main areas in which the debate between direct compositionality and LF has been particularly active, including quantifier scope, ellipsis, reconstruction and connectivity effects. In doing so, different syntax-semantics frameworks GB/Minimalism, Combinatory Categorial Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar, etc. will be briefly compared.