Introduction to English Grammar

1. Introduction.

This class will illustrate some of the approaches to English grammar that have been taken over the last four centuries and then situate this course’s approach relative to that spectrum. Next, a fast-paced overview of the entire course will be provided.  This will allow students to see where the following lectures, which go into greater detail, fit into the larger picture.

2. Verbs and clause structure.

This class will examine the various kinds of verbs and the ways that they can be affected by tense, aspect and modality.  We will then look at the various canonical clauses that can be built up around these verbs.

3. Nouns and adjectives.

We start our discussion of the parts of speech by looking at how nouns are not limited to “persons, places and things”, and how adjectives should not be understood as “words that describe nouns”.   We will adopt a better set of diagnostics, and then proceed to a more detailed discussion of case, pronouns, and noun phrases.

4. Adverbs and prepositions.

Adverbs and prepositions are also often misunderstood, so we will start by defining the category adverb more strictly and then go on to show how prepositions are more flexible than people frequently suppose them to be.

5. Clause type and negation.

Having covered the main parts of speech, we are now in a position to look more carefully at clauses and see how they can differ from the canonical examples from class 2.

6. Subordination and relative clauses.

The focus now shifts to an illustration of how we can embed clauses within one another through various grammatical devices, a topic which will also be explored in class 7.

7. Non-finite and verbless clauses.

There is a set of clauses with verbs that are missing some of the properties typically associated with main-clause verbs.  There is another set that is lacking verbs altogether.  This class is devoted to the forms and functions of these sentences.

8. Coordination.

In coordination, elements of (roughly) equal status become a larger unit together.  We’ll look at the ways in which this layering is structured and how various complications arise.

9. Information packaging.

Some grammatical structures are semantically equivalent and yet appropriate in different situations.  We’ll look at how discourse requirements can change our sentences in a variety of ways.

10. Morphology and punctuation.

We’ll end the course by looking at how individual words are formed through inflectional and derivational morphology.  We’ll also take a look at punctuation, which will be more approachable for students who have learned the concepts addressed over the previous nine classes.

By the end of this course students shouled be able to:

• Use technical terms to describe and evaluate English sentences;

• Describe English grammar from a scientific perspective;

• Clearly articulate the meaning that a given sentence supports;

• Describe factors that distinguish good and bad writing;

• Engage in further study in linguistics with confidence.

Essential:

• Huddleston, R. and Pullum, Geoffrey K., 2005. A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Recommended:

• Huddleston, R. and Pullum, Geoffrey K., 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press