16.7 2nd and 3rd years Lesley Stirling. 12.5 points of Linguistics at first-year level or Departmental approval. Second semester Two lectures and a tutorial a week. By the end of the subject, students should:

• understand and be able to apply the central concepts and notational devices of descriptive syntax;
• have developed skill in discovering, analysing and describing the grammatical structures of different languages;
• have acquired an awareness of the range of syntactic variation in human languages, and also their universal, invariant characteristics.

An introduction to basic concepts and methods of syntactic analysis and description from a typological, cross-linguistic perspective. Regular assignment problems and a take-home examination paper, totalling 5,000 words.