Course Description

The primary goal of this module (in conjunction with Morphosyntax 2) is to give an introduction to grammatical structural analysis, to enable students to undertake basic fieldwork in the study of their own, or another, language, and to enable students to benefit from linguistic descriptions written by others. After an introduction to morphology, students will learn to analyze the internal structure of phrases, clauses and sentences, and recognize and describe grammatical categories such as number, person, gender, tense, and mood.

Course Objectives

At the end of the course the students will be able to demonstrate:

1. A knowledge of linguistic levels and the ability to discern patterns in language data
2. An understanding of grammatical categories and the technical vocabulary (lingui­stic ter­minology) used to describe them;
3. An awareness of the variety of marking devices found in African languages;
4. Skill in analyzing language data from various African languages;
5. Skill in describing the structure and function of units at each level.