SPAN 509 Functional Syntax

Course objectives are to (1) become acquainted with the study of grammatical constructions and the cognitive and interactional processes that shape them, (2) sample approaches in this area (usage-based theory, grammaticalization, typology, interactional linguistics), and (3) gain practical skills for carrying out a quantitative syntactic analysis of appropriate speech corpus data, drawing on the methods of linguistic variation analysis. Working individually and jointly, students will learn to distill findings into suitable format for scholarly venues and, by the end of the course, should have a paper to submit as a conference abstract and develop for journal submission.