The Structure of English Vorlesung

How can we describe and analyse the grammar of English? And how many 'grammars of English' are there? Maybe you've already looked at more than one of the big reference grammars of English, have compared them with a (considerably smaller!) standard school grammar, and have been puzzled by the variety of different terms, concepts and theoretical assumptions you found. Particularly if you want to become a teacher, you may have wondered in how far those big grammars are bound to make your professional life easier or more difficult. This course is designed as an introduction to basic problems in the description of the structure of English, with a focus on syntactic structure, and on the description of syntactic structure as we find them in the big and the small reference grammars. This course is not, however, a practical language course. Thus, apart from learning the basics of English syntactic structure, you will have the opportunity to practice the art of working with large reference grammars and relate the terminology you find there to the linguistic principles underlying such descriptions. We will start by looking at what 'proper' or 'correct English' is and how the notion of 'grammar' can be applied to different varieties of English. We will then move on to look at word structure and clause structure of English. Language and Politeness Für alle Studierende mit der Ausnahme von BA LA-Studierenden, die ihr Studium im WiSe 12/13 begonnen haben: erfolgreicher Abschluss des Kurses 'Introduction to Linguistics'.. Universität Siegen SoSe 2013 Genre and Register Variation Braun, Maria, Dr. Language Typology and Gender across Languages