Structure of English

Course Description

How can we analyze and describe the structure of English? Maybe you have already looked at more than one of the big reference grammars of English, have compared them with a (considerably smaller!) standard school grammar, and have been puzzled by the variety of different terms, concepts and theoretical assumptions you found. This course is designed as an introduction to basic problems in the description of the morpho-syntactic structure of English. Apart from learning the basics of English morpho-syntactic structure, you will have the opportunity to practice the art of working with large reference grammars and relate the terminology you find there to the linguistic principles underlying such descriptions. We will start by looking at what proper or correct English is and how the notion of grammar can be applied to different varieties of English. We will then move on to look at word structure and clause structure of English.