Contrastive Grammar

Course content

The purpose of this course is to give an insight into language comparison with a clear focus on English-German contrasts. Starting with an introduction to Contrastive Linguistics (i.e. its major goals, methodology, findings and fields of application) we will go on to compare German and English sentence structure (as well as related morphological aspects) from two perspectives, the descriptive as well as the generative syntactic perspective. Building up on students' knowledge of sentence structure gained in the introductory course, we will look at categories, sentence structure and syntactic movement in more detail, including underlying theoretical principles postulated in generative syntactic theory. Lectures will include practical work in the form of exercises.