intro to syntax query

[Wendy Smith]

Here at CSUSB, we are five linguists also in an English dept. Our graduate 
lingusitics courses are discourse and pragmatics centered. The original 
linguist who designed the "English Syntax" course did so because she felt 
deficient in theoretical (i.e., Chomskyan) syntax because it was not covered 
in her grad program at Berkeley. I have tried to a couple times over the 
years to teach formal syntax, but ulimately gave it up because I simply 
could not see the relevance. We have now changed the course's name to 
English Grammar II and use George Yule's semantically-based grammar text, 
which has its flaws but does spark inquiry. Wendy Smith