Applied Grammar

-- KerstinFischer --

Course Overview

The aim of this course is to provide students with comprehensive methods for the study of English grammar. Starting from the question, what is somewhat infelicitous about texts like the following:

This unit contains the coolant isobutane, a natural gas which is very environmentally friendly but also combustible. When transporting and installing the unit care must be taken to ensure that none of the refridgerating circuit components become damaged. In the event of damage avoid naked flames or ignition sources and ventilate the room in which the unit is placed for a few minutes. (Constructa CK 102 Instructions for use: 12)

Choose right audio settings for this player according to your audio system requirement after connection is made. If the type of speaker connected does not satisfy the channels recorded in MPEG 2 disc, the disc will not be played in all channels but only in 2 channels (i.e. even if the front speakers and the centre speakers are connected, a disc recorded in 5.1 channels will be played back only in 2 channels) DVD recorded in Linear PCM/192KHZ sampling will also be played in only 2 channels. When a scart cable is used to output the analog audio signal, it is recommended that the analog audio output be set as 2 channels; otherwise there would not be other channels signal output such as no actors voice when playing 5.1 channels disc. (ELTA 8817 DVD Instruction Manual: E-12)

we focus on:

• issues of word formation, in particular on word formation and the possible relationship between nouns of compounds like refridgerating circuit components and audio system requirement ;

• constituency, i.e. on methods for distinguishing the units of a sentence;

• methods for describing sentence structure, in particular for describing structural ambiguities such as ventilate the room in which the unit is placed for a few minutes ;

• transitivity analysis, i.e. functional roles that can be assigned to units of clauses;

• types of participants, in particular the thematic roles that can be assigned to participants;

• constructional and grammatical meanings, in particular the meaning of grammatical categories and markers, such as tense, aspect and voice;

• types of linguistic meanings, in particular descriptive, social, and expressive meanings and their relationship to grammar.

By the end of the course, students will be able not only to discuss grammatical structures of texts in a scientifically informed way, but also to apply their grammatical knowledge to improve the grammatical structures of texts from different registers. In particular, students will be able to

• analyse the structure of compounds
• identify morpheme boundaries
• carry out morphological analyses
• apply word formation procedures
• identify sentence constituents by applying appropriate tests
• provide structural analyses of sentences to visualize structural ambiguities
• identify the mood element in a sentence
• identify participants, processes and circumstances in a clause and understand how this contributes to the way the ‘world’ is represented in the clause
• assign functional roles (subject, predicate, object, etc.) to the above
• assign thematic roles to the participants
• correct bad grammar on sentence level with respect to
  • consistency of tenses, voice, person, number
  • parallel structures
  • modifier attachment and scope
• distinguish between different types of meaning
• build up taxonomies
• identify presuppositions and entailments of sentences
• identify semantic relationships between lexical items
• build up and analyse semantic fields

Course Schedule

Date		Topic	Reading Assignment
Feb. 7th		Introduction
Feb. 14th		Morphology	Bauer (2003), ch. 2
Feb. 21st		Morphosemantics	Börjas & Burridge (2001), p. 16-23
Feb. 28th		Constituency	Börjas & Burridge (2001), p. 23-38
Mar. 7th		Sentence Structure	Börjas & Burridge (2001), p. 38-44
Mar. 14th		Transitivity Analysis	Halliday (1985)
Mar. 21st		Applying Grammar: Example Analyses
Mar. 28st		Thematic Roles	Saeed (2003), ch. 6
Apr. 11th		Grammatical Meaning	Cruse (2000), p. 267-291
Apr. 18th		'Good Grammar'	http://www.mhhe.com/mayfieldpub/tsw/toc.htm
Apr. 25th		Types of Meanings	Loebner (2002), ch. 2
May 2nd		Meaning Relations	Loebner (2002), ch. 3
May 9th		Revisions and Exam Preparation

• handoutTransitivityAnalysis.pdf: handout for March 14th

• handoutThematicRoles.pdf: Handout for March 28th

• handoutGrammaticalAnalysis.pdf: Handout for April 4th

• mockexam1.pdf: Example for exam questions, prepare for March 21st

• HandoutTransitivityThematicRoles.pdf: handout on transitivity analysis and analysis of thematic roles March 28th

• mockexam2.pdf: example for exam questions, prepare for May 2nd