Grammar and Discourse
Course Outline – 9-20 December 2013
Institute of Foreign Languages, Royal University of Phnom Penh
Elly van Gelderen ()
Objectives:
The aim of this course is to provide (a) an introduction in sentence-level grammar, (b) an application of grammar to discourse, and (c) practice with various corpora and electronic resources.
The first part will examine the major syntactic structures of English. Topics include categories, phrases, functions of phrases, types of verbs, clauses, and finiteness. The student will acquire understanding of and facility with syntactic arguments, e.g. arguing why an adjective is `correct' in a particular position, what differentiates an object from an adverbial, and explaining ambiguous sentences. The course stresses that it is more important to be able to argue something than just memorize rules.
The second part looks at text coherence, different registers (formal and non-formal, etc), and style. Throughout the course, I hope we can make extensive use of various corpora, the British national Corpus, the International Corpus of English, the Corpus of Historical American English, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
Texts:
All reading will be placed as pdf-files on: http://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/Gr&Disc.htm
The texts we will use are:
An Introduction to the Grammar of English, by Elly van Gelderen. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010. Revised edition.
Chapters from books by Biber & Conrad 2009 and Lindquist 2009.
Evaluation: 2 Homework Assignments @25 points each: 50 points
2(10 minute) quizzes @ 5 points: 10
1 In-class exam 25
1 Presentation 15
Total: 100 points
Organization
Every class period, there will be a mix of a lecture, discussion, and exercises. Students are expected to (a) read the assigned chapters before class as well as attempt the exercises at the end of each chapter, and (b) hand in homework assignments, participate in the quizzes and exams. The presentation will be a 5 minute presentation on/explanation of a grammar point, a particular tree, a prescriptive rule, or a feature of a particular style/discourse.Your notes or handout for this presentation need to be handed in.
Tentative Schedule
Day: Date: Readings and assignments:
1 9 December Discussion of syllabus; introduction; Grammar, chap 1 and 2 and exercises.
2 10 September Human Rights’ Day: no class
3 11 December Continue chapter 2 and chapter 3; Quiz 1
4 12 December Chapters 4 and 5 Homework # 1 is due
5 13 December If possible: Workshop on Practice with Electronic resources: teaching of grammar and discourse using corpora. Read Lindquist, chapter 7.
6 16 December Chapters 7 and 8; Biber & Conrad chapters 1-3
Homework # 2 is due
7 17 December Chapters 10 and 11 Quiz 2
8 18 December Biber & Conrad chapters 4-5; Presentations
9 19 December Review; In class exam; Presentations
10 20 December Presentations