This unit provides an introduction to grammatical analysis, understanding the interplay of other aspects of linguistic structure for the communicative purposes of language, and developing the practical skills and tools to enable students to think analytically and formally about the structure of a language. This unit examines a wide range of typological patterns which are common in the world’s languages and students analyse real language data from typologically diverse languages and identify, define, and describe the component parts of that data using accepted linguistic terminology. The course will be based primarily on data from poorly described languages. Topics: The communicative basis of grammar Categorisation Identifying constituents/Word classes Phrases and clauses Clause structure and linear order Semantic roles Grammatical relations & alignment patterns Valency changes Clause grammatical operators (Tense, aspect, modality, illocutionary force) Noun phrase structure Nominal grammatical operators Information structure Morphology