E-101, Engelsk grunnfag språk (del A) (Theory of English Syntax, introductory level)
Instructors: Førsteamanuensis Peter Svenonius and Professor Waldemar Marton.
To all E-101 students: Thanks for a great semester. I hope you learned as much as I did. Final grades, including approximate breakdowns of essay versus sitting exam grades, are now available from Siri Sørland.
Everything below is old information, last revised just after classes ended.
There is a review exercise to do, in two parts which are meant to be done in sequence: Part I, then Part II. What is posted here is identical to what was handed out in class, apart from some minor corrections and a link to a partial KEY (the keys handed out in class were more or less complete, so this is posted only for those who are unable to get a hardcopy). Please don’t print out pages you don’t need to, it is a waste of paper. You have to think of the poor trees.
The sitting exam will take place on Wednesday, December 6. The grade will be computed on the basis of the sitting exam plus the project paper (the ‘essay’).
TIMETABLE: Here is a sketch of a timetable for the class, subject to change (Keys, when available, will be linked to the assignments, which are posted in the weeks they are assigned; lecture notes, when available, are linked in the "Topic" column).
| Week starting | Instructor | Topic | Reading | Assignment | August 28 | Svenonius | Introduction | Aarts, Chs. 1-3 | Sentence diagramming | September 4 | Svenonius | Lexicon and Morphology | Finegan, Ch. 2 | Noun-verb derivation | September 11 | Marton | Semantics | Finegan, Ch. 6 | Cf. handout from Prof. Marton | September 18 |
Svenonius | Phrase structure rules | Finegan, Ch. 5 | Try 5-1, 5-2, 5-3 in Finegan | September 25 | Svenonius | Transformations | Finegan, Ch. 5 (cont’d); Aarts, Chs. 4-5 | Finegan 5-4, 5-5 5-8, 5-9. | October 2 | Marton | Dialect and Register | Finegan, Chs. 10-11 | Cf. handout from Prof. Marton | October 9 | Svenonius | X-bar theory | Aarts, Chs. 6-7 | Sentence diagramming: adjuncts and complements | October 16 | Svenonius | Movement | Aarts, Ch. 8 | Try exercises 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 (pp. 153-154). | October 23 | Marton | First and Second Language Acquisition | Finegan, Ch. 15 | Cf. handout from Prof. Marton | October 30 | Svenonius | Argumentation | Aarts, Chs. 9-10 | Exercises 1, 2, 4, 5 pp. 175-7; Exx 1-9, pp. 203-8 | November 6 | Svenonius | Constituency | Aarts, Chs. 11-12 | Exercises 1-4, pp. 223-5; exx. 1-3, 5-7, pp. 238-40 | November 13 | Svenonius | Review |
Older information, slightly updated:
There is no Friday section meeting. This class meets three days a week only, as scheduled below.
An information sheet was handed out at the information meeting on August 28th. That sheet (lightly updated) is posted here in English and Norwegian versions.
The meeting times and places are listed in the table below; lectures are in blue squares, discussion group in green.
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday 10.15-11.00 Øvre lysthus U.01 (discussion group) 11.15-12.00 12.15-13.00 Nedre lysthus U.01 (lecture) Øvre lysthus U.01 (lecture) 13.15-14.00 14.15-15.00 15.15-16.00
The course is divided up between myself and Professor Marton in the following way: Approximately one-fourth of the weeks are being taught by Professor Marton (both lectures and discussion sections), with a general linguistics syllabus drawn from the Finegan book. Approximately three-fourths of the weeks are taught by me, based on syntax, drawing in the first weeks from the Finegan book (Chapters 2 and 5), later from the Aarts book.
Pensum:
We will be covering most of the Aarts book. As for the Finegan book, I will be using chapters 2 and 5, as noted above, and Professor Marton will lecture on the topics in the following chapters:
Chapter 6: Semantics
Chapter 7: Universals and Typology
Chapter 10: Language Variation across Situations of Use: Registers
Chapter 11: Language Variation among Social Groups: Dialects
Chapter 15: Acquiring First and Second Language
The final exam will be on Wednesday, December 6.
Back to Peter Svenonius’ Home page.
Last updated January 14, 2001