Course Number:

Credit Hours:

3

Course Title:

Issues in English Grammar

Course Description:

Explores how as native speakers of a language we manipulate a vast number of symbols, as each day we make up and understand a stream of brand-new sentences. This effortless and completely unconscious ability depends on a set of unconscious rules, a linguistic system called the “mental grammar.” Investigates what this grammar looks like in an attempt to understand the basics of how language works. Our focus is on three areas: syntax (sentence structure), morphology (word structure), and phonology (sound structure). Part of each class has a “workshop” format with a slant toward “doing” linguistics: working with data, analyzing it, and ultimately explaining it.