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Morphology and Syntax (ENG -206): Course outline (ENG -206)

Course objectives

On successfully completing the course, the students will have knowledge of:

    • Basic concepts in Morphology

 
    • The relationship of Morphology with the other branches of Linguistics
    • Theoretical underpinnings in Morphology
    • Have a sound analytical knowledge of key areas of English grammar as an object of intellectual inquiry, rather than as a set of rules to be learnt
    • Use analytical tools to sort out grammatical problems for themselves
    • Describe the Syntax of English Sentence.

 

Course description

The course covers some key concepts in Morphology. The course aims at developing understating about the relationship of morphology with other branches of linguistics. Further, it helps students in raising a theoretical understanding of word-building, including discussion from English Morphology. The course provides a bridge between generative approaches to syntactic theory and more traditional descriptions. This course will provide students a toolkit for analysis in Morphology, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Stylistics, Sociolinguistics, Computers in ELT & Linguistics and Research in English language structure and teaching grammar at school level.

Course contents

Unit-I: Basic concepts

  • What is morphology?
  • Morphology and other branches of linguistics
  • What is a word?

Unit-II: The internal structure of English words

  • What is a morpheme?
  • Morphemes as signs
  • The distribution of morphs
  • The segmentation of words into morphemes
  • The hierarchy of morphs and units alike

Unit-III: Lexeme-building mechanisms

  • Semantic change
  • Lexeme-manufacturing
  • Lexeme-building borrowing
  • Lexeme-building affixation
  • Lexeme-building apophony
  • Compounding
  • Blending
  • Idiomatization of phrases and sentences
  • Back-formation

Unit-IV: Inflectional morphology

  • Grammatical category
  • Types of grammatical categories
  • Wordform-building mechanisms
  • Syntactic grammemes in English
  • Semantic grammemes in English

Unit V: Descriptive Syntax

  • Scope
  • Relationship between DS and ELT

Unit VI: Sentence Structure: Constituents

 
  • Structure
  • ‘Phrase’ and ‘constituent’

Unit VII: Sentence Structure: Functions

  • Subject and predicate
  • Phrase and Verb Phrase
  • Dependency and function

Unit VIII: Sentence Structure: Categories

  • Nouns
  • Lexical and phrasal categories (Noun and Noun Phrase)
  • Adjectives and adverbs
  • Adjective phrases and Adverb phrases
  • Prepositions and Prepositional phrases
  • Co-ordinate Phrase

Unit IX: Internal Structure of Noun phrases

  • Determiners
  • Pre-determiners
  • Pre-modifiers in NOM
  • Post modifiers
  • Modification of pronouns

Unit X: The Verb Phrase

  • The complements of the Verb Group
  • Adverbials
  • The Verb Group

Unit V: Sentences within Sentences

  • Complementisers: that and whether
  • The functions of that-and whether-clauses
  • Adverbial clauses
  • Wh-Clauses
  • Wh-questions
  • Suboridinate Wh-clauses
  • Subordinate Wh-interrogative clauses
  • Relative clauses

 

Textbooks

Teaching-learning strategies

Teaching will be done through lecture method with a combination of tasks/projects and presentations.

Assessment and Examinations

Assessment will be done as per university/department policy.