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The primary purpose of this seminar is to demonstrate an advanced research program in linguistics, and it uses the topic of partitivity as the example. The course will begin with the basics of partitives and why we distinguish a cup of the tea from a cup of tea in grammatical analyses. In short, partitivity is a fundamental notion in semantics where we discuss a specific entity—e.g. some tea—and a subset of the entity—a cup of the tea. Related topics like quantification, measurement, definiteness, pronouns, noun phrase structure, etc. will also be addressed. In particular, we will look at the realization of nominal partitivity across dialects of English, German and Dutch. The course will review examples of research and grammatical analyses in the subject area and we will pay particular attention to the extent to which each piece of research connects to the others and to general questions in linguistics. Each student will be expected to deliver a 30-45 minute presentation in class based on a reading assignment. |
