Course Description and Goals: This course has three goals:  (1) to help you perfect your knowledge of the structures found in English noun phrases, along with their meanings and uses, and to improve your control of the semantics and pragmatics of the English tense and aspect system; (2) to develop your skills in analyzing these structures and comparing them to similar ones in your A languages; (3) to develop your general skills in English.

Coursework and grading:

- The course has a theory component and a practical component, each of which corresponds to one session per week.  You may have a different instructor for the practical component than you do for the theory component; however, you will receive only one final grade for the entire course.

- The main focus in the practical sessions will be working with texts and developing your vocabulary and overall language skills.

-     Your final course grade will be determined as follows:  60% based on the final exam, 10% based on two assignments related to the theory component of the course, and 30% based on assignments related to the vocabulary/writing part of the course.

Syllabus for the theory component:

Week 1:  Brief introduction to Tense and Aspect. Talking about the present.  Description of general states of affairs in the present vs. situations in progess

Week 2: Talking about the past. Generic/habitual contexts in the past (use of simple past, used to, would).  Situations in progress in the past.  Anteriority.

Week 3:  Talking about the future: use of present, present progressive, be going to, will, be about to.

Exercise due (Practice session): Writing assignment #1

Week 4: Generic noun phrases.  Use of articles with common and proper nouns..

Week 5: Quantification; all, both, half. Open and closed-class quantifiers; Indefinite determiners (few, a few, any, some, etc.).  Negation and indefinites.

Week 6: Genitive ’s and related prepositional phrases.

Week 7: Enriching nominal descriptions via postmodification. Participial postmodifiers. Adjectival complementation.  Discontinuous adjective/complement structures.

Week 8: Enriching verbal/sentential descriptions via adverbs/adverbials.  Manner, point of view, and speaker oriented adverbs.  The effect of an adverb’s position on its meaning.

Week 9: Degree modification of verbs, adjectives and adverbs: complex structures.

Mandatory reading:

The Catcher in the Rye. J.D. Salinger.

Recommended readings: Recommended readings:  

Collins, P. 2000. English Gramar: An introduction. Palgrave McMillan.

Downing, A. & Locke, P. 1992. A university course of English grammar. Harcourt.

Greenbaum, S. 1991. An introduction to English grammar. Longman.

Greenbaum, S., and Quirk, R. 1990. A student’s grammar of the English language. Longman.

Huddleston, R., and G. K. Pullum. 2002.  The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.  Cambridge University Press.