What Natural Language Grammars Do (That Artificial Grammars Don't)

3 credits · Undergraduate

This course explores what so-called natural language grammars do (and what artificial grammars don't do?... yet?), through a survey of some key analytic foci of the contemporary anthropology of grammar. This course considers relationships between grammatical categorial structures and symbolic texts (including computational texts), with a special emphasis on the many functions of natural language grammars (and asking if and how artificial languages can or cannot perform these functions), especially through a careful consideration of deixis (symbolic pointing with forms like this, now, me), developing an account of how deictics figurate personae and set scenes in verbal texts.