Syntax 1 Wiki
Syntax 1
Welcome and Prospect
This course gives a systematic introduction to the scientific study of English syntax. We will ask what enables people to understand sentences they have never heard before and to decide reliably whether some string of words they hear is grammatical English or not. To this end, we will precisely define the notion ”grammar” and show that it is people’s knowledge of the grammar of English that underlies the abilities mentioned above. In the process of defining ”grammar” we will learn about a number of technical tools of modern syntactic theory: types and type hierarchies, feature structures, constraints, and syntactic schemata.
Prerequisites: The course Introduction to Linguistics.
Administrative Matters
Online Grammars
To help you visualize the abstract syntactic structures, we will work with online grammars. These are available permanently. Here are the links to the grammars:
Online Grammar for Chapter 2: HPSG Background
OLAT
The OLAT course for Syntax 1 is at Syntax 1 on Olat.
Week 1
Table of Contents:
- 1. Words
- 1.1. Major parts of speech
- 1.2. Minor parts of speech
- 1.1. Major parts of speech
- 2 Phrases
- 3 Predicates and Arguments