University of Chicago: Koldo Mitxelena Chair 2021

The Koldo Mitxelena Chair of the Etxepare Basque Institute at the University of Chicago has organized the course ´Word order and the syntax-semantic / pragmatic interface. A comparative analysis of Basque, Spanish and English´. It begins on Monday, March 29, and will end 6th of December. It is aimed at graduate and undergraduate students. Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria will be the speaker.

The purpose of this course is two-fold. On the one hand, it is designed to provide a complete picture of some of the main grammatical properties of Basque, and also explain the context of the language: a non-Indo-European minority language spoken in a small territory, divided on both sides of the border between France and Spain.

On the one hand, it is designed to offer a complete picture of some of the major grammatical properties of Basque, a non Indo-European minority (and typologically isolated) language (around 750 thousand speakers) which is spoken in a small territory, split on both sides of the western border between France and Spain.

On the other hand, they will discuss and offer an analysis of a set of specific properties of Basque related to word order and the syntax-semantics/pragmatics interface and put them into a broader perspective on the basis of a comparative analysis with other languages, especially Spanish and English. They will focus on three major theoretical issues — focalization, interrogative sentences and negation— as well as the interactions between them.

They will be presenting the major phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic/pragmatic properties exhibited by the structures under analysis, discussing previous approaches in the literature and offer new alternative analyses.

The Koldo Mitxelena Chair of the University of Chicago is one of the nine chairs organised by the Etxepare Basque Institute at universities abroad. The Koldo Mitxelena Chair is part of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and offers seminars and lectures related to the Basque humanities.