This popular course book gives students of English and linguistics a systematic account of the rules of English syntax, and acquaints them with the general methodology of syntactic description. It teaches them how to formulate syntactic arguments, and how to apply the tests in the analysis of sentences.

This popular course book gives students of English and linguistics a systematic account of the rules of English syntax, and acquaints them with the general methodology of syntactic description. It teaches them how to formulate syntactic arguments, and how to apply the tests in the analysis of sentences.

This practical coursebook introduces all the basics of modern syntactic analysis in a simple step-by-step fashion. Each unit is constructed so that the reader discovers new ideas, formulates hypotheses and practises fundamentals. The reader is presented with short sections of explanation with examples, followed by practice exercises. Feedback and comment sections follow to enable students to monitor their progress. No previous background in syntax is assumed. Students move through all the key topics in the field including features, rules of combination and displacement, empty categories, and subcategorization. The theoretical perspective in this work is unique, drawing together the best ideas from three major syntactic frameworks (minimalism, HPSG and LFG). Students using this book will learn fundamentals in such a way that they can easily go on to pursue further study in any of these frameworks.

"Focusing on the descriptive facts of English, this volume provides a systematic introduction to English syntax for students with no prior knowledge of English grammar or syntactic analysis. English Syntax aims to help students appreciate the various sentence patterns available in the language, understand insights into core data of its syntax, develop analytic abilities to further explore the patterns of English, and learn precise ways of formalizing syntactic analysis for a variety of English data and major constructions such as agreement, raising and control, the auxiliary system, passive, wh- questions, relative clauses, extrapolation, and clefts"--Publisher's description.

This textbook introduces basic concepts of grammar in a format which should encourage readers to use linguistic arguments. It focuses on syntactic analysis and evidence. It also looks at sociolinguisic and historical reasons behind prescriptive rules.