Face-to-face , first and second term, 60 hours of theory and 30 hours of exercises.

English

GERM1240A - English: Linguistics II and practical exercises (part 1) [1 Q. • 30 Th. + 15 Ex. • Pond. : 50] Christopher Powell, Jennifer Thewissen
GERM1240B - English: Linguistics II and Practical Exercises (part 2) [2 Q. • 30 Th. + 15 Ex. • Pond. : 50] Christopher Powell, Jennifer Thewissen

At the end of this course, students should be able to:
• Identify and define the concepts pertaining to the field of syntax (e.g. form, function, parts-of-speech, phrase, clause, sentence, form-function interface, etc.);
• Concretely illustrate and analyse English in terms of the syntactic phenomena presented during the course;
• Read some academic scientific articles relating to English syntactic phenomena.

For the Bachelor in French and Romance Languages and Letters : General :

For the Bachelor in Modern Languages and Letters: German, Dutch and English :

For the Bachelor in Philosophy :

None

The first part of the course aims at defining syntax and situating it within the wider domain of linguistics. This section goes through basic syntactic concepts (forms, functions, word classes, etc.) but also presents more advanced concepts to gain a more detailed knowledge of English syntax (detailed overview of clauses, complex phrases, analysis of tree diagrams). The second part looks at differences between the written and spoken registers by analysing the phenomena which are typically associated with the syntax of speech (word order, dysfluencies, etc.). The course also includes a section on learner English and the ways in which learners of L2 English acquire/use different aspects of English syntax (over- and under-use of certain forms, syntactic errors, etc.).
Students will also be required to read a number of scientific articles presenting the results of empirical studies in the field. These articles aim to give an overview of the writing conventions used in linguistic scientific articles and also serve towards illustrating the key steps to go through when conducting a linguistic study (abstract, methodology, description of results, etc.).

This course will include theoretical presentations by the lecturer. Theory will be accompanied by concrete exercises to apply the concepts presented. Students will also be required to read a limited number of scientific articles in order to become familiar with academic scientific writing.

• Mid-term written exam at the end of the first term
• Written exam in June
• Individual attendance and student participation during lectures will also be taken into account in the final mark

Biber, D., Conrad, S., and Leech, G. (2002). Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Essex: Longman.
Biber, D., Conrad, S., and Leech, G. (2002). Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English Workbook. Essex: Longman.
Aarts, B. (2008). English Syntax and argumentation. Basingstoke, Hampshire and: Palgrave Macmillan.
Biber, D., and B. Gray.  (2011).  The historical shift of scientific academic prose in English towards less explicit styles of expression:  Writing without verbs.  In V. Bathia, P. Sánchez, and P. Perez-Paredes (eds.), Researching specialized languages, pp. 11-24.  Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gilquin, G., and Paquot, M. (2008). Too chatty: Learner academic writing and register variation. English Text Construction 1 (1), pp. 41-61.
Granger, S. (2013). The passive in learner English: Corpus insights and implications for pedagogical grammar. Learner Corpus Studies in Asia and the World.
Neff van Aertselaer, J., Ballesteros, F., Dafouz, E., Martinez, F., and Rica, J.P. (2007). A Contrastive Functional Analysis of Errors in Spanish EFL University Writers' Argumentative Texts: A Corpus-based Study. In Fitzpatrick, E. (ed.), Corpus Linguistics beyond the Word: Corpus Research from Phrase to Discourse (Language and Computers 23). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 203-225.
Rühlemann, C. (2006). Coming to terms with conversational grammar: Dislocation and dysfluency. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 11(4), pp. 385-409.

PowerPoint presentations, work documents, scientific articles and audio-visual aids.