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