SPAN 509 Functional Syntax

Students will (1) become acquainted with the study of grammatical constructions and the cognitive and interactional processes that shape them, in their social context; (2) sample approaches in this area, including usage-based theory, grammaticalization, typology, construction grammar, interactional linguistics; and (3) drawing on the methods of linguistic variation analysis, gain practical skills for carrying out a quantitative morphosyntactic analysis of appropriate (speech) data. 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.