239772 Foundations of Morphosyntax (S) (SoSe 2013)

The focus of this course will be the core grammar of any language, the interaction and dependency relationships between morphology and syntax. Drawing on recent evidence assembled in the crosslinguistic research in grammaticalization we try to establish that processes in morphology such as compounding can be attributed properties of an underlying syntactic mechanism and that therefore more universal patterns of explanation for language hold true and can be applied to morphology and syntax.
Further, we will look at the complex interaction between word order and morphological marking and argue that both are two sides of the same coin. This will lead to an in-depth discussion of the information structure in English, particularly with special respect to phenomena such as semantic causation and its grammaticalized sibling, causativity.