I already have a youtube channel that has videos on every topic in the 4th edition. Click on my usename and you'll find it (www.youtube.com/@CarnieSyntaxthEdition)

Thank you, Professor Carnie! I was asking about longer videos in which you would do in-depth analysis (like this) of more complex examples of concepts from X-bar and Minimalism from later chapters. 🎉 @@CarnieSyntaxthEdition

There is an embedded clause and PRO goes in the specifier of the embedded TP just like all other subjects.

@@CarnieSyntaxthEdition I really appreciate your response! But I still cannot figure out how to deal with the DP Robert, then. Would the embedded clause 'PRO to leave' be a complement to N 'Robert' in DP? I saw your videos up to Chapter 15, but I don't think I saw a tree diagram on 'Object control structure.' (I apologize for making questions on videos uploaded quite a long time ago.)

Robert is in the spec of the AgrO of the main clause

@@CarnieSyntaxthEdition Thank you very much for your help! Now I can draw the tree structure!😊

Yes the sentence on the slide should have a “that” in it. I said it when I read the sentence but is wasn’t on the slide

The claim of the VoiceP hypothesis is that agents aren’t assigned by the verb but by the active Voice head. Indeed that’s what it means to be active: having an agent or causer. By contrast the passive voice explicitly lacks the agent/causer. So the theta role is assigned within the VoiceP because Voice, not V assigns the theta role

PS this is made explicit in the theta grids for active and passive voice. See page 338 of the book.

@@CarnieSyntaxthEdition thank you for the response, sir.

Glad it was helpful!

Glad I could help!

You are very welcome

You're very welcome!

This is part of a phenomenon called "Exceptional Case Marking" or ECM. There's a vast literature on this phenomenon and many different hypotheses on how to explain it. The most common approach, although now dated is that the complementizer "for" assigns case to the NP under government.

Your intuition is not wrong. When you have a verb like "eat", you have a direct object (typically a DP). That DP can be modified by a relative clause. So a paraphrase for your sentence is "I will eat [DP the thing [CP that you gave me]]" -- see the section in the book on how relative clauses involve wh-movement. Now what is going on in your sentence is you have what we called a "Headless Relative Clause". A quick google search will bring up papers on how those are structured. But one common analysis is they are simply relative clauses that are modifying a null noun --essentially omitting "The thing" in my sentence above -- so the structure of your sentence might be something like "I will eat [DP Ø [CP what you give me]]" If that's the correct analysis of headless relative clauses, then the wh-word is in the specifier of the relative clause CP and the direct object of "eat" is a null NP that is co-indexed with the "what" operator. Needless to say, this is not the only analysis of headless relatives that has been proposed, but it's a fairly common one.

I have no idea why there is a strike through in my comment. That was not intentional.

@@CarnieSyntaxthEdition Thank you!

The term "head" is often used ambiguously in Syntax. It can mean "The thing that gives it's category to the phrase (so a D is the head of a DP, A V is a head of a VP etc). The other meaning, confusingly can mean "not a phrase" or alternately "word". In this video the term is being used in the latter sense. The DP "The peanuts" has only one categorial head ("the"), which is reflected in the label on top of "the peanuts". Peanuts is the categorial head of the NP "Peanuts", which is a dependent of the DP. So the DP only has one "head" in this sense. But in terms of the "functioning as a terminal" sense, The peanuts has two terminals "The" and "peanuts". "Peanuts" is simultaneously a head (qua terminal) and a phrasal element (dominated by something else it doesn't share a category with (the DP). But only "the" is the head in the categorial sense of the word. Sorry this terminology is confusing -- not my fault! But what's happening is you are understandably confusing these two independent notions of what a "head" is.

Thank you for that detailed explanation. I am so grateful you made this wonderful series publicly available. I tried watching some of Chomsky's technical videos but could not understand them. Your explanations are clear and susinct and I wish I could take your course but I live in Australia. This series is the next best thing, thank you sincerely for all the effort you put into this.

PS. My copy of the text is coming on Monday!

the MLC is sensitive to why an element is moving. in this case, the DP is moving for case. The specifier of VoiceP is not a potential case position (theta roles get assigned in the spec of VoiceP, but it's never a place where case is assigned) so it is not a "potential case position", and the MLC doesn't force the DP to land there.

@@CarnieSyntaxthEdition very lucid indeed. Thanks Professor.

John is not in the specifier of CP. It's in its case position in the specifier of TP. So it doesn't interfere. I guess the bracketed diagram in the 2nd sentence might be confusing you. I just didn't put the [TP in so the embedded clause is actually [CP [TP John. John isn't in the specifier of CP. (PS. Specifier, not head. These words are not in the heads, they are in the specifiers.)

Thank you for clarifying that. I am eagerly awaiting my copy of the textbook. This series is so good!

It is discussed on page 304 of the 4th edition of the textbook. Tensed auxiliaries (but not auxiliaries that only bear aspect or voice and not tense) undergo head movement to T in English.

As linguists, we are scientists, so we talk in descriptive rather than prescriptive terms. Prescriptive grammar requires "whom" as an accusative case, but descriptively this is not true of any dialect of Modern English. Descriptively "who" is an acceptable accusative form for most speakers of English who haven't been corrupted by prescriptivism.

Good point. I have been corrupted! It's still nice to understand the cases. Who did she kiss? Him, not he, so who as an accusative. I had whom drummed into me at school in the 1960's but we will die off too, just like whom.

Glad it was helpful!

Glad it was helpful!

Many thanks!

You are very welcome

Unfortunately no, this won't work. They both allow the idiomatic meaning. That's entirely expected though, because neither let nor saw (in this context anyway - I'm only talking about the "saw" that takes a clausal complement, not simple transitive "saw") assign a theme theta role. So "shit" cannot be an underlying argument of either of these matrix verbs, so the idiomatic meaning is allowed.

You're welcome 😊

The rules are determined empirically by analyzing the data and employing constituency test to test our hypotheses.

@@CarnieSyntaxthEdition OK, got that. Thank you for taking the time to reply. And also special thanks for taking the time to record this course. It is very useful. :)

See chapters 10-18

Hi, The answers to both your questions are dealt with in Chapter 14.