How to judge what is acceptable or unacceptable in English; how to distinguish acceptable from "stylistically preferable"; how grammar often takes on larger meanings; understanding the differences and diversity within the language.
Investigating prescriptive grammar; tracing the history of specific grammatical rules and academic usage guides; noting how such guides justify right versus wrong; learning about historically famous and influential grammarians.
Diving into descriptive grammar; observing the wealth of grammatical knowledge one knows intuitively in various examples; how comparing the descriptive with the prescriptive can help one make more informed choices about usage.
How words are defined and categorized into parts of speech; how words expand or move into new categories; how nouns, verbs, adverbs and their syntax are characterized; delineating the difference between a phrase, a clause and a sentence.
Investigating countable and uncountable nouns; the details of how they are used with modifiers; delving into irregular plurals in English; observing the ways they are formed; learning about collective nouns; the question of subject-verb agreement.
Entering the world of pronouns; beginning with personal pronouns; the complications that arise around conjoined constructions; taking on interrogative and indefinite pronouns; asking questions such as whether "none" can be both singular and plural.
Anne Curzan
Host
