This course is an upper-level introduction to linguistics that investigates the major syntactic structures of American English. The main aims of the course are to introduce students to grammatical analysis, with the English language constituting the primary object of study. Some of the practical course goals are to understand how to determine the syntactic category (“part of speech”) of words in a text, to be able to find the major phrases in a sentence and their functions, and to be able to comment with grammatical precision on a text (including your own writing). The intended audience for this course is future language arts teachers, English majors, Linguistics majors, and anyone who has an interest in approaching language through an analytical lens.