Syntactic Constructions in English: A Construction Grammar Perspective

This course offers formal and explicit descriptive analyzes of English from a Construction Grammar perspective that takes constructions (pairings of form and meaning) to be at the heart of the grammar. In the last decade, Construction Grammar, aiming to account for the full range of (not only core but also peripheral) facts about language, has emerged as one of the most rapidly growing grammatical frameworks and is recently gaining firmer ground in generative grammar circles. While taking students step-by-step through the reasoning processes that yield the best description of a data set, the course shows students not only what the analyzes of particular structures are, but also how and why those analyzes are constructed. Exploring all the main syntactic phenomena in English (eg, agreement, raising and control, relative clause,..