Foundations of English Grammar

(PLINS103)

last updated 8 Dec 2003

 

This is a one-term (half-unit) course for first-year students taking the BA Linguistics at UCL. The teacher is Professor Richard (Dick) Hudson.

Aims

My main aim is for you to be able to do grammar, but I'd also like you to understand what you're doing and to be able to talk about it and some background issues.

What I mean by 'doing grammar' is analysing the basic grammatical structure of a sentence. More precisely, I shall help you to:

  • classify each word in terms of a small set of word classes (noun, verb, etc) and an even smaller set of inflections (finite or non-finite);
  • show how the words fit together to make the sentence.

You can't do this just using ordinary language, so I'll teach you a special notation for showing sentence structures. (It's one of many - you'll learn a different notation in Introduction to Generative Grammar A, but I'll help you to see how they relate so it won't be a problem.) Here's an example of the kind of analysis you'll be able to do by the end of my course:

However I'm much more ambitious than most grammar teachers. I aim to teach you so much that you will be able to analyse almost every word of almost any English sentence. As you'll see below, the assessment assumes that you can do precisely this by the end of this one-term course.

As I said above, my other aim is to help you to understand what you're doing and to talk about background issues. You will spend some time talking about grammar in class, but I'll also ask you to write about it - as I explain below.

Methods

The teaching will have a number of separate components:

  • A one-hour 'lecture' each week (Mon 3-4) in which I talk the whole class through particular areas of grammar, with a mixture of talk from me, talk from you and lots of diagrams and other stuff on the board. I'll put the handout on the web after each lecture.
  • A weekly one-hour tutorial (on Tuesday) in which I see you in a smaller group (of about 10 students) to work through examples and to discuss both specific and general issues to make sure you understand what we're doing.
  • Exercises that I ask you in the lecture to prepare for the tutorial.
  • A mini-text of about 30 words that you:
    • choose from any book, magazine or newspaper
    • copy out (preferably word-processed) with double-spacing on a separate piece of paper with your name on it
    • analyse using whatever analytical system we've built so far in the course
    • hand in to me at the next 'lecture'; I'll return it in the following tutorial with feedback.

    The mini-texts carry no marks.

  • A course-book by me: English Grammar (Routledge, 1998).
    • This contains all the basic ideas of the course, but I shall present them in class in a different way, so the book will give you a different perspective on the ideas. Each chapter corresponds exactly to one week of the course, so you should read the relevant chapter either before or after the lecture.
    • The book also contains lots of exercises, with answers at the back of the book, so I strongly advise you to do these to reinforce the teaching in class. If the exercises raise problems bring them to the tutorial.
    • Perhaps most important of all, it contains a model analysis of a 100-word text. This is exactly what I am asking for in the assessment.

Assessment

At the end of the term you produce two pieces of work, which you hand in by 5:00 pm on the last day of term. I give equal marks to the two pieces.

  • A complete analysis, using the system that I've been teaching, of a 100-word text of your own choosing.
    • I mark it in a mechanical way by deducting half a mark for every mistake.
    • 100 words = at least 100. Don't go much over - just to the end of the sentence.
    • If you really can't handle a word or string of words, just bracket it off with <...> and ignore it (but don't count it, of course!). If I think you should have been able to handle them, I may penalise you.
    • You can choose any text you want, but it should be a sensible choice - made up of sentences, not just a string of words like a shopping list. If in doubt ask me, because I may be able to warn you about traps that you may not have noticed.
  • An essay of between 1,000 and 1,500 words (no more!! I am NOT impressed by long essays. Brevity is a virtue.) about one of these three 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.

Resources on grammar and for essays

Here are some links to other web pages which you may find helpful.

  • For the essays:
  • For improving your understanding of grammar:
    • The UCL (English Dept) Internet Grammar of English - takes you through some standard analyses, with explanations and exercises. Uses phrase structure rather than dependency, and assumes different analyses in some places - especially determiners and auxiliaries - but generally compatible with the FEG analysis.
    • VISL, a Danish site for teaching grammar (even English grammar) to students at school as well as university. Shows you how to analyse sentences (including sentences you offer it - it works them out for itself) using a system which is basically very similar to the FEG one, though it uses trees rather than arrows; but doesn't give explanations. Again there are some systematic differences between the analyses, but not many. It sometimes gets the analysis of new sentences wildly wrong, but it's usually instructive to work out for yourself why it went wrong.
  • What is standard English? A collection of three introductory articles by linguists.

Philosophy

For a general description of the philosophy behind this course see an essay I have written for a web guide to teaching in linguistics.

Handouts

Here are the handouts distributed so far:

  • General course plan
  • Lecture 1. Nouns and verbs
  • Lecture 2. Noun expansions: heads, dependents and adjectives
  • Lecture 3. Linking words: prepositions and coordinators
  • Lecture 4. Subclassification: pronouns, determiners and other nouns
  • Lecture 5. Verb expansions: subjects, objects, 'sharers' and adverbs
  • Lecture 6. Verb chains: auxiliary and full verbs and finiteness
  • Lecture 7. Fancy verb chains: to, that, not and clauses
  • Lecture 8. Subordinate clause clues: wh-pronouns, prepositions and non-finite verbs (again)
  • Lecture 9. Subordinate clause uses
  • Lecture 10. Sentences and information: it, there, apposition and punctuation.