The Syntax of English was a really exciting class to TA. I assisted Vera Gribanova, which meant that the class was fast-paced, challenging, and covered a lot of material. One of my biggest take-aways from Vera's teaching style was how she trusted the class enough to let them build generative syntax theory by themselves. Every class was based on empirical English data, and when our model failed to capture new data (or predicted ungrammatical data), the class gave their own suggestions for how to change the model to better capture the English language. In the end, the class had derived standard X-bar theory and truly understood all the steps that led them there.
I taught a weekly, mandatory section, in which we went through practice problems, reviewed complex concepts, and played with some fun English sentences.
I taught a weekly, mandatory section, in which we went through practice problems, reviewed complex concepts, and played with some fun English sentences.
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