LING 360 The Structure of Language
This course provides an exploration of Morphology and Syntax, focusing on the analysis of word structures and how words combine into phrases, clauses, and sentences across linguistic typologies. Emphasizing a descriptive approach, the course examines morphological processes such as word formation, inflection, and morphophonemics, alongside syntactic patterns in English, from basic to complex structures. Students will engage with linguistic theories, including Chomskyan frameworks, X-bar theory, and Universal Grammar, while exploring variation and change in English morphosyntax over time. The course also incorporates perspectives from language acquisition, cognitive linguistics, and sociolinguistics, to encourage students to connect morphological and syntactic phenomena to broader contexts of language learning and usage.
Prerequisites
4 Undergraduate credits
Effective December 16, 2024 to present
Learning outcomes
General
- Identify the principal structures of English syntax.
- Employ linguistics specialized morphological and syntactical descriptive terminologies with a high degree of consistency.
- Use the rules of word formation to distinguish between types of morphemes (e.g., derivational and inflectional).
- Distinguish between morphemes, phonemes, allomorphs, and allophones.
- Identify sentence and clause types (nominal, adverbial, and adjectival) by degrees of complexity, structure, and transformational operations.
- Analyze core topics in syntax (e.g., constituency, case, and binding).
- Apply linguistic theories such as productive syntax ("rule-based"), theories of morphological processing and storage, syntactic rule manipulation, the Chomskyan Framework approach, synchronic and diachronic morphological perspective, "language-to-brain" corollary, and others.
- Demonstrate an intermediate-level grasp of the relationship between syntax and morphology.
- Develop original academic arguments rooted in independent linguistic analysis.
- Perform morphological and syntactical analysis with emphasis on features arising in second language acquisition.
- Critically analyze complex linguistic data sets situated in legacies of colonialism, genocide, linguistic suppression, and linguistic devaluation associated with the teaching of English in historic and present-day contexts.