University of Sussex

This course introduces students to descriptive English grammar and to central themes relating to sound patterns and pronunciation in English. The first part of the module, which focuses on grammar, provides you with an understanding of the way in which phrases and sentences are constructed and equips students with the skills to break sentences down into their constituent parts, to describe the category and grammatical function of those parts, to distinguish clause types, to distinguish the parts of the English verb group, to construct and test hypotheses and to represent sentence structure by means of tree diagrams. The second part of the course focuses on phonetics and phonology. Students acquire knowledge and understanding of the production of sounds and the skills necessary to describe, define, and transcribe consonants and vowels using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Students are also introduced to fundamental concepts related to contrast and meaning in sound structures and to fundamental concepts in phonology that go beyond the description of individual sounds, such as syllable structure, stress, and phonological processes and the relationship between pronunciation and spelling.