Syntactic Structures
Ling 55: Syntactic Structures
This course provides a basic introduction to the methods and results of transformational generative grammar. It simultaneously provides an overview of the major syntactic constructions of English. We will be interested in the ways that languages are systematically alike in their basic sentence structure and the ways in which they are systematically different. Our approach will be to teach about this theory by building up, a (partial) formal theory of sentence structure, a grammar, which attempts to model what a native speaker knows, whether consciously or not, about his or her language. We will start by considering data from English, and will turn later in the course to data from a number of other languages.
Prerequisites: satisfaction of the entry level writing requirement (ELWR) and Composition (C-2) requirement.
General Education Code: IH (Introduction to Humanities).