English 324 (Section 2): The Structure of English

Syllabus for Fall 2011

Mondays and Wednesdays, 6:00 - 7:15 p.m. in 4208 Helen C White Hall

Instructor	Assignments
Materials	Assessment and Grading
Aims of the Course	Course Outline
Reference Grammars	Instructor's Home Page

Professor Richard F Young 7163 Helen C White Hall Office hours: Wednesdays, 12:00 - 2:00 p.m., or by appointment E-mail: rfyoung at wisc dot edu Home Page: www.wisc.edu/english/rfyoung Phone: 263-2679

Class E-mail List.

Use the class e-mail list as a public bulletin board for discussions about the class.  You may send e-mail messages to me and to all students registered for this course through this e-mail list.  Send your messages to english324-2-f11 at lists dot wisc dot edu. In order for you to receive messages from the e-mail list, your e-mail address must be in the Registrar's database.  You can update your preferred email address by accessing My UW-Madison, "Student Records" tab, "Preferred Address" module.

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MATERIALS

	REQUIRED: Elly van Gelderen (2010). An introduction to the grammar of English. (Revised edition). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.  ISBN: 978 90 272 1168 2.
	RECOMMENDED: Laurie Bauer & Peter Trudgill (Eds.). (1998). Language myths. London: Penguin Books. ISBN: 978 014 02 6023 4.
	RECOMMENDED: Online resources to supplement An introduction to the grammar of English at http://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/grammar.htm
	RECOMMENDED: The Corpus of Contemporary American English at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

Both textbooks are on reserve at the College Library Reserve Book Collection, located in the first floor center area just across from the entrance to the library.

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Aims of the Course

In this course you will learn to describe how English sentences are constructed and you will develop the skills necessary to analyze sentence structure. In so doing you will use some of tools and methods of modern linguistics. You will also confront some popular myths about the English language and discover why they are false.

Describing how English sentences are constructed is not the same as telling people which sentences you consider examples of "good" or "bad" grammar.  Rather, it is a way of looking inside native speakers' heads in order to find out what they know about the English language that allows them to communicate clearly.  What native speakers know about their language is called their "competence."  Native speakers' competence includes knowledge about how to pronounce words and sentences like How do you say carpal tunnel syndrome? (phonology), how to break down complex words like funky and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious into their component parts (morphology), and how to relate words like Odysseus and sentences like I took the road less traveled by to their meanings (semantics).  In this course we will make only passing mention of phonology, morphology, or semantics; instead we will direct our attention to syntax -- the ways in which sentences are constructed from smaller units called phrases and how sentences are related to each other.

By the end of this course you should have acquired skill in analyzing simple and complex English sentences, and you should be able to explain and justify your analysis to other people.  You will also be able to draw tree diagrams and will impress your friends by your confident use of technical syntactic terms like adjunct, complementizer, ellipsis, lexical category, modal, and wh-movement.  You should also become skilled in arguing against people who hold mistaken beliefs about English. If by the end of the course you have fallen in love with syntax, then you should nurture the relationship by taking more advanced courses such as English 329 (Introduction to the Syntax of English) and English 708 (Advanced English Syntax).

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Assignments

Attendance and Readings. You are expected to attend class regularly and to complete weekly readings assigned from the textbooks.  I will circulate an attendance list at each class meeting.

Exams. Your knowledge and interpretation of the readings and lectures will be assessed in two in-class exams. A midterm examination will be held on Wednesday, October 19, which will focus on the topics covered in the course until that point. All questions on the midterm exam will be taken from the exercises in Chapters 1-5 of van Gelderen. The final exam will be held in class on Wednesday, December 21 and will focus on topics covered in the course after the midterm.

Grammar Exercises. You are expected to write responses to exercises from van Gelderen. I encourage you to do these activities in groups of 3-4 students. Hard copies of your responses are due on the Monday of the week following the week they were assigned. If you miss class on a day when an exercise is due, you may send your responses as an email attachment to me. Late assignments will not be accepted. One assignment will be a make-up. If you complete this assignment, you will have your grade on the make-up assignment substituted for the lowest of the other 10 grades that you have received on the other grammar exercises.  If you do not complete the make-up assignment, it will have no effect on your final grade.

Language Myths. On five occasions throughout the semester, a group of 3-4 students will present a popular but mistaken belief about language. The presentation should include everybody in the group and should last about 15 minutes. In preparing the presentation, read the relevant chapter in Bauer & Trudgill's Language Myths and find some people who believe the myth, then recount the myth to the class and explain why people who believe it are mistaken. You do not have to give me a written summary of your presentation. The group grade will be determined by the votes of the students in your audience on the Presentation Evaluation Form.

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Assessment and Grading

Percentage grades will be awarded for your responses to the Grammar Exercises and for the two exams. The meanings and equivalencies of the grades are as follows:.

The final grade for the course will take into account grades awarded on all assignments in the following proportions.

Incompletes. The grade of "Incomplete" will only be used for a student who has carried the course with a passing grade until near the end of the semester and then, because of illness or other unusual and substantial cause beyond his/her control, is unable to complete the remaining assignments.

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Course Outline

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Reference Grammars

If you get a reputation as a grammar expert, people often ask you questions about English that take a lot of time to answer.  For example, I received an email from Taiwan asking,

Is the following sentence correct or not? "The behavior of a person during his lifetime, be it good or evil, is accumulated over time."  If yes, why should we use "be it good or evil" here?  What does "be it good or evil" originally come from?

For questions like this and for your own interest, it's useful to own a big fat reference grammar that contains answers to lots of questions about English.  Here are three that I have used and that I recommend.

	Marianne Celce-Murcia & Diane Larsen-Freeman. (1999). The grammar book: An ESL/EFL teacher's course (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.
	Rodney Huddleston & Geoffrey K. Pullum. (2002). The Cambridge grammar of the English language. New York & Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
	Randolph Quirk & Sidney Greenbaum. (1985). A university grammar of English. London: Longman.

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This page last revised November 28, 2011