Course overview
Morphology deals with the internal structure of words and their meaningful parts. Syntax is concerned with sentence structure how words are combined together to form phrases, phrases combined together to form larger phrases, clauses and sentences, and how clauses are combined together to form complex sentences. Together, morphology and syntax comprise the core of the grammar of a language. Since grammar is no longer a major focus in schools, most students have little understanding of even the most basic notions such as being able to identify parts of speech, or understanding how large constructions are composed out of smaller units. Being able to identify constituents and agreement constraints will help students to improve and correct their academic writing. The course will be practical in focus and will teach students essential skills for the linguistic description and analysis of a language. Along with Phonology, this course is essential for all linguistics students and language teachers (English or otherwise).
Course learning outcomes
- Develop understandings of the nature of human language and identify differences with other systems of communication.
- Develop understanding of the structure of language, specifically its morphological subsystems.
- Develop understanding of morphophonemic processes in language.
- Develop understanding of the lexicon and lexical categories (i.e. parts of speech).
- Develop understanding of compositionality, constituency and dependency relations.
- Develop understanding linguistic typology with regard to morphology and syntax.
- Develop understanding about grammatical relations and their expression.
- Develop understanding of both lexical and derivational valence and their implications for argument structure.
- Develop understanding of a variety of complex sentence phenomena.
- Develop in students the ability to undertake grammatical analysis of unfamiliar languages, and an awareness of the range of coding phenomena encountered.