ENGL 371 A: English Syntax

Winter 2012—George L Dillon
MW 12:30-2:20 LOW 101

Text:

Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, A Student's Introduction to English Grammar Cambridge UP, 2005.
—based on The Brute: The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), 1848 pages. Copy in the Reserve Collection in Suzzallo.
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe and Christopher D. Manning, "Stanford typed dependencies manual" (2008, 2011) (hndout)

Tools:

For download:

• GrammarScope: Stanford Parser Grammatical Relation Parser provides a GUI front end for the Stanford Parser (along with the parser). Runs on Java (all platforms) and has unique display of grammatical relations using colored highlighting.
• dependencyviewer. Similar to grammarscope but draws nice dependency trees. Also runs on Java, also by Bernard Bou.

On-line:

• Connexor Machinese Syntax   
• Resources for the Study of Grammar  http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/GramResources/
• The Internet Grammar of English—http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/—is a nice little primer with automatically graded exercises. Relevant sections are noted in the Calendar.
• Wikipedia has a lot of useful material and is reliable on the whole
• wordandphrase.info: New, alternative itnerface for COCA.
• You may find the Notes on the Exercises useful.

Scope and Objectives:

The course provides the understanding necessary to teach English, and writing, in the schools. It focuses on the basic grammatical constructions of English and several approaches to describing and representing them. We will cover

• lexical categories (Parts of Speech),
• syntactic categories (such as phrases, clauses, tense, and aspect),
• grammatical and dependency relations,
• syntactic structure of the sentence,
• analysis of sentence and text connection
  

We will use some of the on-line tools for automated POS tagging and graphing ("diagramming"). By the end of the course, you will be able to describe most of the major syntactic constructions of English in several ways. In addition, you will be able analyze the cohesion of sentences in connected text.

Written Work and Grading:

Written work will consist of one 3-4 page paper ("tagger project"), 2 midterms, and final. Selected exercises from the textbooks will be part of the class preparation and participation grade. Each of these will make up one-fifth of the final grade.

Final exam due 5pm Friday March 15th my office

Office hours: M: 2:30-3:30; Th: 11-12
A404 Padelford
Last revised: 12/28/11