Method of assessment: written exam

Entry requirements for the exam: AN155 G2

 

Course description:

The aim of the course is a structural survey of the English sentence complemented by some semantic and pragmatic perspectives. The lectures discuss the following syntactic relationships: constituency, government and binding, concord, grammatical case and polarity relations. Besides the simple canonical structures the course explores sentences generated by embedding and conjoining. Students will be introduced to devices of focusing via clefting and extraposition, as well as other kinds of movement of constituents in the sentence. In the investigation of certain semantic constraints on syntactic operations the theory of semantic arguments will be used. The course finishes with the elucidation of the trinity of form, meaning and function.

 

Bibliography:

Aarts, Bas. 1997, 2001. English Syntax and Argumentation. Palgrave Ltd. ISBN 0-333-69344-2

Huddleston, Rodney D., Geoffrey K. Pullum and Laurie Bauer. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press. 2002. ISBN 0-521-43146-8

Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, and J. Svartvik. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London and New York: Longman. 1985. ISBN 9780582517349

Radford, Andrew. Transformational Grammar. 1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-34750-5

Radford, Andrew. English Syntax: An Introduction. 2007. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-54275-8