Four Years, Three Departments, Two Empty Categories, One Chance to Tie It All Together

Shay, Theresa

Four Years, Three Departments, Two Empty Categories, One Chance to Tie It All Together

Files

Shay_thesis_1991.pdf(1.97 MB)

Date

1991

Authors

Shay, Theresa

Advisor

Napoli, Donna Jo, 1948-

Department

Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics

Type

Thesis (B.A.)

Language

en_US

Terms of Use

Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.

Abstract

This paper will examine the relationship between theoretical linguistics and foreign language pedagogy by looking at the passive voice in German in order to show to what extent these fields are, could, and should be related. The passive voice is interesting to an endeavor like this one because it is an important construction in syntactic theory. The passive is crucial to Chomsky's Government and Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981)--now the most widely accepted and widely known syntactic theory--because it explains the need for movement, one of the main tenets of the theory. The specifics of this idea will be explained below. This paper is divided into six sections, including this section, the introduction. Section II provides an overview of the presentation of the passive construction in language textbooks as well as how it is presented in the classroom. Section III explains the basic ideas of Government and Binding Theory, as well as its explanation of the passive. Section IV looks at the goals of syntactic theory and foreign language pedagogy and draws conclusions about their relationship in teaching a foreign language. Section V examines the uses of the passive voice in German literature through specific examples, and Section VI provides a conclusion to this thesis.

Permanent URL

http://hdl.handle.net/10066/10738

Collections

Linguistics

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