Word and Grammar

Many modern theories of grammar are almost entirely based on English, having been developed mainly to describe the structure of English and, to a much lesser extent, other familiar languages of Europe.  But the languages of the world are highly diverse, many of them, in contrast to English, with highly complex word and inflectional structures and relatively simple phrasal structures.  Theories of grammar built on English serve such languages poorly.  This course seeks to address this imbalance by focusing on languages with complex morphological and morphosyntactic structures.  Because the grammars of such languages are built around word structures, we will be exploring current lexicalist theories of grammar such as Lexical Functional Grammar and Construction Grammar to develop formal explicit analyses of these languages.  One learns morphological and morphosyntactic analysis by doing it across languages of various types, so we will regularly be working through problems to analyze in class.