Meeting time. 12:30-2pm Tuesdays and Thursdays, room KCB 201.

Instructor. Paul Hagstrom, 621 Commonwealth Ave., room 105. Email: hagstrom@bu.edu (likely to get a quick response). Phone: 617-353-6220 (x3-6220). Office hours: T11-12, W2-3, R3-4.

Prerequisites. CAS LX 250 (Foundations of Language), or consent of instructor.

Short description. Exploration of a central issue in theoretical linguistics, the typology of question formation across languages, from several perspectives. Syntactic universals and variation, semantic interpretation and discourse effects, and intonational effects will be brought to bear in developing a theoretical understanding.

Note on major requirements. This course will be accepted as satisfying the “linguistic analysis of a specific language” requirement for the Linguistics major.

Course description:

What are questions? (And why are they important?)

The properties of question formation have played an important role in the development of Linguistics. In this course we will concentrate in depth on this seemingly narrow, but ultimately quite rich, area of language. We will look both at the influential proposals in the development of theories and at the cutting edge of current research.

Languages differ in several ways in their strategies for forming questions, most clearly in terms of changes in word order and changes in intonation. Within a single language, questions can also express a wide range of meanings and have many different types of effects on the progression of a discourse.

In this course, we will look at some of the syntactic differences between languages, such as the restrictions on what types of questions cannot be asked (such as “*What did Pat laugh while Chris cooked?”) and the ways in which these restrictions hold (or don’t) across languages, as well through the history of certain languages. We will also look at the many different meanings questions can have and try to understand why questions can have just those meanings and not others, again a property that we explore across languages. We’ll look also at the interaction of the prosodic structure of questions with their pragmatic effects. And we’ll look at the common property across languages to form certain types of indefinite pronouns (like “somewhere” in English) from question words, and what we can learn about the morphology of languages.

In the process, we will look in some detail at question formation in a few languages, Japanese in particular (although no prior exposure to Japanese is necessary), but also Chinese, Bulgarian, French, German, and Hungarian, as well as some less common languages that provide important evidence, such as Sinhala, Tlingit, Malay, and Basque.

This course provides a unusual (and fascinating!) opportunity to bring several different strands of linguistic theory to bear on the understanding of a single (but complex) phenomenon.

Course Requirements. Homework. Weekly homework assignments. Midterm exam. Take-home midterm will be due Mar 5. Final exam. There will be a final exam.

Homework. Whenever feasible, homework can be emailed to me at hagstrom@bu.edu. Text-only is preferred, but you may also send PDF, RTF, or Microsoft Word files. Postscript files are less welcome, and don’t even bother sending Word Perfect files. Wherever email won’t work for any reason (e.g., for tree diagrams), homework can be turned in at the beginning of class. Be aware that if you use any special fonts, I may not be able to read your homework—be sure you know how to “include” nonstandard fonts (or send it to me early, so I can let you know if I was unable to read it).

Late assignments. Late assignments will not be accepted without prior arrangement.

Readings. There is no textbook for this course. Individual readings (articles, book chapters) will be assigned throughout the semester. These readings will be available in the hallway outside my office suite, in a folder labeled LX500. You may take the readings out for no more than an hour to make a personal photocopy, and then they should be returned to the folder so that others may photocopy them.

CAS Student Academic Conduct Code. As a member of a CAS course, it is essential that you read and adhere to the CAS Student Academic Conduct Code. In particular, several types of plagiarism (any attempt to represent the work of another as your own) are defined by this academic conduct code. A copy is available in CAS 105.