Foundations of English Grammar

Essays

last updated 17 Sept 2003

Essay topics

1 An in-depth discussion of a problematic sentence in your 100-word text, explaining why the analysis is problematic, outlining some alternatives and evaluating them.
2 A systematic presentation of a single small area of English grammar.
3 A grammatical comparison of a single small area of English with the corresponding area of some other language's grammar.

General guidelines

  • Your essay should show off what you have learned during the course - plenty of examples, technical analyses and technical terms, plenty of clear arguments and evidence, no waffle.
  • However you will also have to think about the topic - none of the essays can be done by copying (or even paraphrasing) from a book. We shall discuss the topics in tutorials.
  • Don't get side-tracked into details (especially in essay 3) - it's important to focus on main issues and use details just in examples.
  • I'll be happy to discuss your essay plan at any time before the last week of term, but I don't want to comment on draft essays because this confuses the marking.
  • I shall also pay attention to the essay's presentation - paragraph and sentence divisions, other punctuation, spelling - and, of course, grammar!
  • It should include a list of your sources of information, properly presented with bibliographical information (as in this handout - pay attention to the details of presentation). Any direct quotations should be marked off by quotation marks, and attributed to their source. (See the departmental guidelines on presenting essays, which you should have been given at the start of term.)
  • It should be word-processed and printed double-spaced on one side of the paper, with a font of 12-point size.
  • If you want general help with writing essays, try the writing-skills section on the department web site. There's a page there specially written by me for FEG students. You should also check the department regulations on presenting essays.
  • There are some model essays from previous years on the web site. These are all about Essay 3, because later students are less likely to want to write about these particular languages, but if your language has already been discussed in one of the model essays, don't worry - use the model essay as a source of ideas, but refer to it if you include any of its ideas in your essay. Think for yourself - maybe the model essay could be improved in some ways, and you can easily find an area of grammar that it doesn't discuss.


Guidance on the essay topics

The reading material is in books which should be easily accessible. The list of books referred to is at the end of this page, as it should be in your essay.

Essay 1: An in-depth discussion of a problematic sentence in your 100-word text, explaining why the analysis is problematic, outlining some alternatives and evaluating them.

Reading for Essay 1:

  • There's an online Encyclopedia of English Grammar and Word Grammar which contains short articles on some individual problem words (e.g. many). I wrote it mainly for second-year students taking my 'Word Grammar' course, but you should be able to cope with most of the ideas..
  • Consult any of the big modern dictionaries, such as the Colins Cobuild Dictionary of the English Language. They often have useful little articles about grammar mixed up with the word definitions, and (rightly) don't try to make a clear distinction between grammar and vocabulary. They'll be in the UCL library reference section (or in Waterstones!).
  • Consult one of the big grammars of English: Quirk et al 1985; Biber et al 1999; Huddleston and Pullum 2002. Don't be scared by the size of the book (but make sure you don't drop it on your toe!!) Use the index to find the word you're interested in and hope the list of pages is short! The big grammars are full of really good examples and often have very insightful discussion of the problems of analysing particular constructions - Huddleston and Pullum is particularly good for this.
  • Consult any other grammar of English that you can find (e.g. in Waterstones) - there are dozens of them, mostly written for the EFL market. At least they'll give you an analysis for your problem word, and if you're lucky it may give some discussion of the problems.

Comments on Essay 1:

  • This is probably the hardest of the topics because it takes you straight to the frontiers of research.
  • An example: Suppose your text contains the word many (as in I don't read many books.) This is a surprisingly tricky word to analyse because by some tests it qualifies as an adjective while in others it qualifies as a noun.
  • Your job is to lay out the problem as clearly as you can, then present two or more alternative solutions with their respective pros and cons. If you can come to a conclusion, go for it! But don't forget to argue for it.
  • We'll come across plenty of problematic words or patterns during the tutorials, so there's no shortage of things to talk about!
  • Don't forget to use as much technical terminology and notation (diagrams) from the FEG course as you can.

Essay 2: A systematic presentation of a single small area of English grammar.

Reading for Essay 2:

  • Consult a couple of small grammars of English to get an overview of your area. There are dozens on the market. For example, UCL library has 15 books with "English grammar" in their title and published since 1995. (To find them, go to Euclid, the library catalogue, select Advanced search, select title, type in 'English grammar' (without quotation marks), select Publication Year, type in (believe it or not!) '1995 or 1996 or 1997 or 1998 or 1999 or 2000 or 2001 or 2002 or 2003', click on Go, click the number '15' that will appear against 'Total'.) Promising authors in this list are Collins, Wardhaugh, Haegeman, Boerjars, Greenbaum.
  • For details only, consult the big grammars recommended for Essay 1.
  • For an advanced view of the approach I've taken in this course, see Hudson (1990), which includes systematic presentations of several areas of English grammar.

Comments on Essay 2:

  • The trick here is to choose an area which is big enough to be interesting but also small enough to be manageable. Here are some suggestions:
    • tense
    • interrogatives
    • imperatives
    • negation
    • restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses
    • apposition
    • phrasal verbs
    • passives
    • sharers (aka raising and control)
    • some area of derivational morphology
  • Even if you find a brilliantly clear explanation in another book, your job is to translate it into the terminology and notation that you've learned in this course. You certainly won't find that in any book (other than my own).Don't forget to attribute material that you've found in a book by referring to the source.
  • The main test of success is clarity - showing clearly how all the ideas in this area are interconnected. You'll find that you're not just listing facts but describing an intricate network of words, word classes and dependencies. This isn't straightforward in prose, so use any method you want for organising the information - tables, pictures, bullet points, labelled sections may all be helpful.
  • Don't forget to use examples; one example is often worth a whole paragraph of prose. Present your examples as linguists do, with each example on a separate line with a number.

Essay 3: A grammatical comparison of a single small area of English with the corresponding area of some other language's grammar.

Reading for Essay 3:

  • Look up your language in Asher (1994) and Bright (1992). If you're lucky you'll find an article about your language which summarises the main facts about grammar, phonology etc. Read that before you consult grammar books, because these have a nasty habit of telling you more than you really want to know about fine details!
  • Then search for grammar books on the UCL library catalogue system (Euclid). Type 'grammar', 'English' and the name of your language in the 'title' field - if you're lucky you may find a book on 'English grammar for students of X' or 'X grammar for English learners'.
  • On the internet:
    • try http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/rbeard/grammars.html - a collection of links to grammars that are available electronically on the web.
    • search for your language on google (google.com).
    • search for articles about your language in Linguistics Abstracts Online. (On one of the UCL cluster PCs, select ELIB service, then G-L, then LABS. At the time of writing this has stopped working but it may be working again by the time you get to it.)

     

Comments on essay 3:

You will probably find the most interesting comparisons in the following areas:

  • basic word order (head-first/last; SVO, SOV, etc?)
  • inflectional morphology (how much, which word classes, what distinctions are made?)
  • derivational morphology (how much, what patterns?)
  • special clause types (negative, interrogative - how are they distinguished?)
  • grammatical functions (subject, object - how are they distinguished?)

General points on Essay 3:

  • You shouldn't try to cover all the points in the list above - just choose one that you find interesting.
  • In making each comparison, don't forget to say what the relevant fact about English is: whereas English does X, my language does Y.
  • Remember to stick to the most general patterns - don't get side-tracked into irrelevant details (however much you may love these!).
  • You don't need to be a native speaker of the language, but if you're not you may need to check the facts with a grammar book (or a native speaker).
  • Avoid prescriptivism in your discussion of your language (e.g. The form should really be X, but what we all say is Y.)
  • Give examples, but supply translations as well. If your examples are whole sentences, give a word-by-word translation as well as a whole-sentence one.
  • If your language uses a non-roman script, please supply a roman transliteration as well as the official script. Feel free to write non-roman script in by hand if you can't do it on a word processor.
  • Try to give dependency diagrams for some examples in your language like those that you've learned for English; to do this you'll have to work out for yourself how the dependencies work, but in most cases this should be easy and obvious. Don't worry if you can't produce these diagrams in word-processed form - just add them by hand.
  • Use tables, paradigms and so on wherever helpful - continuous prose is often not the most efficient and reader-friendly style. Use section headings etc to show the structure of your essay.
  • If in doubt, see me - I'm especially happy to guide and help on essay 3 because you won't get direct support in tutorials.

Reference List

(NB This list is in alphabetical order by first author's surname, as the references should be in your essay.)

Asher, Ronald. 1994. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Pergamon Press

Biber, Douglas; Johansson, Stig; Leech, Geoffrey; Conrad, Susan; and Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman.

Bright, William ed. 1992. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford University Press

Huddleston, Rodney and Pullum, Geoffrey. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press.

Hudson, Richard. 1990. English Word Grammar. Blackwell.

Quirk, Randolph; Greenbaum, Sidney; Leech, Geoffrey; and Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman.