intro to syntax query

[Paul Hopper]

Shannon,

The problem is always: how to cram some real grammatical knowledge into a single semester without skimping on theory. I don't think Chomskyan approaches can accomplish this, as the theoretical prerequisites are too demanding of time.

I regularly teach a master's degree course called "Rhetorical Grammar" using my own textbook (A Short Course in Grammar, W W Norton, 1999). This is about as theory-neutral a treatment as you can get and still have a technical syntactic orientation. It is monostratal in approach and makes use of Mickey Noonan's "form-function diagrams", a revealing way of simultaneously displaying syntactic forms and sentence-level functions. It assumes a single semester. The book has been quite widely used. 

I'll be happy to answer questions and send you sample chapters as Word files.

- Paul Hopper





> 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
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper
Senior Fellow
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Albertstr. 19
D-79104 Freiburg
and
Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities
Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213