If you had Nico for 120B, I highly recommend taking her for this course as well. This continuity is extremely helpful, as some of my classmates had different 120B professors and weren't entirely familiar with the techniques, content, and teaching style of Nico. She is a great professor, but this course was challenging at times. Some of the technical explanations required on the homeworks and exams in this class were more difficult than those in 120B, because the deeper you delve into syntactic theory, the more blurred the line becomes between what's the "right" and "wrong" answer. I went to TA office hours weekly for help on the homework assignments, because there always seemed to be a few parts or subparts of a question that were difficult or worded vaguely. The midterm was fair (very similar to the homeworks), but the final was very difficult. When it comes to the homeworks and exams, grading-wise, it was somewhat harsher/stricter than in 120B.

She's enthusiastic about learning and students but incompetent where she wouldn't post answers to the homework for review/the slide practice questions and when she was called out for it, she said it was our responsibility to discuss the answers among ourselves. I mean ok ya, I get that but also I just want to know how you want me to write it so I can pass your class. It got really annoying at the end. I would not take it again.

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.

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.

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).

This class was really interesting and Nico is a very engaging professor. The material is really dense, though, and there was a lot of homework. It was also a little annoying because I took Ling 120B with a different professor, and Nico had a different method drawing trees. But she's very sweet and genuinely wants to help people learn. However, I think she has some unreasonable expectations for people's participation. She would never give us answers to practice problems, and wanted us to use the CCLE forum to share answers with each other, which obviously nobody did. The final was also very difficult. I would definitely recommend this class for someone who's interested in syntax, but if you're not, I think it'd just be very hard and time consuming.