There's a lot to know in this class, and it's not easy material. It can get complicated fast. Do not--dear G-d, do not--miss a class. Nico is very nice and very helpful but the expectations are lofty.

You'll learn cool things though. A fair bit of old-school Chomskyan generative syntax. You will not learn minimalist syntax, which is the more accepted paradigm nowadays (for this, take Ethan Poole's class).

BEWARE the final. It is harder than everything you did previously. You really have to know your shit inside and out. When you're studying and making your cheat sheet, don't leave out small things you only covered briefly, even if it was early in the quarter (we had to know the A-over-A rule, which was a briefly covered rule that quickly went defunct and we did not use in our homeworks).

Nico is an articulate lecturer of the topics of Syntax 2, but she makes the class harder by deciding to never post answer keys to homeworks. Homework is a large part of the grade, and is in turn fairly difficult. She does a fair job at adjusting to remote, and incentivises coming to class by giving unannounced daily quizzes weekly.

Nico is a dedicated and approachable professor -- you can really tell she cares a lot about student learning.

Besides several homework assignments (pretty standard with most ling upper divs), there is also a group project you do with a partner (whom you can choose yourself -- since none of us really knew each other due to our cameras being off during class and section not being mandatory, most people just posted in the CCLE forum and found partners that way, including myself). The group project seems daunting at first but really isn't that bad so long as you cooperate with your partner and don't procrastinate. You basically just pick a research topic you're interested in and write a paper about it (how you would conduct the experiment and the implications of hypothetical results, since you can't actually conduct it given the pandemic) and give a powerpoint presentation about it to the class during Week 10/finals week.

There is also a midterm and final for the class, but it's pretty doable if you go over all the review questions/study guides posted for each exam and know the answers and concepts well. The final was definitely harder than the midterm imo, but the curve was pretty generous.

The lectures are reasonably engaging and the slides are very helpful. The best part of the course was the discussion sections and office hours with the TA, Hashmita, who does an excellent job of distilling the material and answering questions. Most of the concepts covered are somewhat simple, but they combine in challenging and non-obvious ways, which is why doing the homework is super important as it causes you to ask questions you may not have thought of otherwise.

Nico is definitely one of the best Linguistics professors I have had at UCLA. She is incredibly patient, makes herself available for student questions and is one of the few professors who have been able to meet the obstacle of holding classes on an online platform head-on. In fact, her lectures over Zoom are one of the best I've ever had due to her love of her iPad and very detailed slides. The one thing I will say is the course content is undeniably challenging. The homework assignments can occasionally be graded harshly and the tests can be very difficult. To put it shortly, working through all of the homework problems is simply not enough. Nico wants to make sure that you understand the theoretical AND application of Syntax. The content began to get rather abstract the more we head towards the final as we touched upon the bridge between models of phonological forms and logical forms. The other comments are not lying: the FINAL WAS DIFFICULT! My best advice is to make sure you actually attend lecture and follow along with her style of reasoning - keep note of how she approaches apparent flaws in X-bar theory, you will be made to go through similar logic on not-before-seen problems during the midterm and the final. If you understand her rationale and the way she approaches problems through considering word-order, phonological forms, what we have learned about the X-bar schema on certain languages (like German, Japanese, Irish); you will do well on both the midterm and final. Overall, discussions are helpful but do not factor into the grade. There was 8 homework overall with the first being graded only on completion and not accuracy. There was occasional extra-credit handed out for participation on the discussion forum (which I highly recommend working on homework ahead of the deadline, sometimes Nico and the TA will straight up give you answers or nudge you towards the correct answer). Daily random quizzes which encouraged participation during lecture and only held about 8% of the final grade weight. Midterm and Final composed the other half. I would definitely recommend Nico if you're genuinely interested in graduate school or learning more about Syntax.

She hid everything about the exam. students didn’t really the answers inside the exam. Most of the questions in the exam are “click all the applies”. If you click one more or less applies, you will get no points on it. The worst design of exam I have ever seen. I feel I have learned nothing in this course. And we don’t even know the score of our final paper. EVERYTHING IS NOT CLEAR IN THIS COURSE! I know there should have other choices for Pure Ling and other majors, you should be better to take others instead!

Nico was a friendly and clear professor. The material was difficult, but overall I feel like I was able to effectively learn everything. My TA Maddy was also pretty helpful, and I feel that both were fair graders.

The class has several homework assignments, and the lowest one is dropped. The midterm and final were both online, and lectures were recorded due to COVID. No textbook needed, and slides are posted on BruinLearn.