122054 PS PS Linguistics (2021W)

"Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. " Joan Didion

This course has as its core goal the training of future teachers who, while aware of many of the syntactic restrictions of the English language, nonetheless to a large extent speak English intuitively, but will need to be able to quickly analyze and explain their intuitive assessment of 'right' and 'wrong' to future students. In other words, it aims at raising their awareness for and equipping them with the tools for syntactic analysis.

Taking the area of English grammar in general and syntax in particular as an example, this course provides students with more detailed insights into one area of linguistics - namely syntax - and prepares them for their first small-scale research project in this area.

After revisiting concepts from the introductory lectures ‘Grammar in Use’ and ‘English Linguistics’, we will explore the topic from different angles, looking at, for instance, tense & aspect and the genitive alternation.

In addition, we will discuss the process of empirical research and look at data elicitation and corpus linguistic methods. Participants will learn how to find relevant literature on a specific research topic/question, critically analyse and reflect on existing research in the field and collect first experience in planning, conducting and writing up a small-scale linguistic research project, as well as presenting their results in the form of a poster presentation.