Department of French and Italian

F577 introduces students to issues in French syntax and to syntactic theory. The aim is to develop an understanding of syntactic categories, the principles governing syntactic representations and syntactic operations. The syntax of French is studied as an example of the product of a biological mechanism linking sound and meaning, under the Minimalist hypothesis that a simple core syntactic operation (Merge) makes human language what it is. Major syntactic differences between French and English will be examined and characterized in terms of those syntactic principles.