122047 PS Proseminar Linguistics 2 (2018S)

Nouns and noun phrases are very important linguistic constituents. As linguistic signs they help us to talk about objects, people, places and abstract concepts. A linguistic system without “nounish” elements is impossible to think of. Noun phrases are expressions of reference, “that is, as linguistic materializations of extralinguistic concepts, and not of attributes, events, actions, relationships, circumstances, etc., which are prototypically expressed by other phrasal categories.[….] The semantic goal of a noun phrase is presentative in the sense that, by uttering a noun phrase, the speaker is activating a referent in current discourse” (Martínez-Insua & Pérez-Guerra 2011: 202-203). At first sight, the structure of the NP in English seems pretty straight forward (Determiner+Modifier+Head+Complement). However, as this course will show, speakers are very creative when it comes to creating new nouns (e.g. facebooker, cronut, thruthiness) and many interesting NP constructions exist which deviate from the default word order (e.g. How big a mess this is; We discussed this face to face; lucky me; Do you want coffee or coffee coffee? …)

In this course, students will investigate interesting nouns and creative NP patterns; especially analyzing morphosyntactic variation in contemporary English. Another aim of this course in to show students what it means to work empirically and how to write an academic empirical paper in linguistics.

The following questions will be answered:

How is the English NP structured? (Headedness, prehead and posthead dependents)
Which interesting NP constructions exist?
How can linguistic NP constructions be detected and analyzed in a corpus?