Syntax 1 Wiki
Introduction
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
Most of the material that was covered in class is written up in the following file:
File:English Language and Grammar.pdf .
Homework for Week 2
1. Work through the following sections of the Wiki.
2. Do the practice exercises on Parts of Speech. 3. Find 3 authentic examples from books or newspapers and annotate the words with their part of speech. Do this with a word processor and upload the result to Olat. 4. Do the practice exercises on Predicates and Arguments. 5. Find 3 new sentences with new verbs and analyze them in the way of the exercises above. Do this with a word processor and upload the result to Olat.