There is no textbook for this class. Students were strongly encouraged to study the below lecture notes as their primary source of information. All lecture notes were authored by the professor unless otherwise noted. There are no lecture notes for Sessions 7, 18, and 20. Session 10 also covered VP-internal subjects; there are no corresponding notes for that lecture but it is an important topic for an introductory class.
All syntax trees in the lecture notes (except for Class 16) are by Prof. Sabine Iatridou and redrawn by MIT OpenCourseWare.
| SES # | TOPICS | LECTURE NOTES |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Hierarchical Organization of Language | Class 1 (PDF) |
| 2 | More on Building Syntactic Trees; Plus Locality Considerations; Theta-Roles | Class 2 (PDF) |
| 3 | More on Theta-Roles; Case; Basics of Binding Theory | Class 3 (PDF - 1.1MB) |
| 4 | Binding Theory; Syntactic Movement; Embedded vs. Matrix Questions; and Wh-movement | Class 4 (PDF) |
| 5 | Islands and Movement | Class 5 (PDF) |
| 6 | A bit More on A-bar Movement; Verb Movement | Class 6 (PDF) |
| 8 | A-movement | Class 8 (PDF) |
| 9 | More on Movement | Class 9 (PDF) |
| 10 | The Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH) | Class 10 (PDF) |
| 11 | Empirical Arguments for PRO |
 Class 11 (PDF)
|
| 12 | Obligatory and Non-obligatory Control | Class 12 (PDF) |
| 13 | Pro versus PRO | Class 13 (PDF) |
| 14 | Covert Movement | Class 14 (PDF) |
| 15 | Tense and Aspect | Class 15 (PDF) |
| 16 | Polysynthesis | Class 16 (PDF) - Lecture notes for this session provided by the teaching assistant, Michelle Yuan. |
| 17 | Conditionals | Class 17 (PDF) |
| 19 | Free Relatives | Class 19 (PDF) |