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.

The goal of this book is twofold. On the one hand we want to offer a discussion of some of the more important properties of the nominal projection, on the other hand we want to provide the reader with tools for syntactic analysis which apply to the structure of DP but which are also relevant for other domains of syntax. In order to achieve this dual goal we will discuss phenomena which are related to the nominal projection in relation to other syntactic phenomena (e.g. pro drop will be related to N-ellipsis, the classification of pronouns will be applied to the syntax of possessive pronouns, N-movement will be compared to V-movement, the syntax of the genitive construction will be related to that of predicate inversion etc.). In the various chapters we will show how recent theoretical proposals (distributed morphology, anti-symmetry, checking theory) can cast light on aspects of the syntax of the NP. When necessary, we will provide a brief introduction of these theoretical proposals. We will also indicate problems with these analyses, whether they be inherent to the theories as such (e.g. what is the trigger for movement in antisymmetric approaches) or to the particular instantiations. The book cannot and will not provide the definitive analysis of the syntax of noun phrases. We consider that this would not be possible, given the current flux in generative syntax, with many new theoretical proposals being developed and explored, but the book aims at giving the reader the tools with which to conduct research and to evaluate proposals in the literature. In the discussion of various issues, we will apply the framework that is most adequate to deal with problems at hand. We will therefore not necessarily use the same approach throughout the discussion. Though proposals in the literature will be referred to when relevant, we cannot attempt to provide a critical survey of the literature. We feel that such a survey would be guided too strongly by theoretical choices, which would not be compatible with the pedagogical purposes this book has. The book is comparative in its approach, and data from different languages will be examined, including English, German, Dutch (West-Flemish), Greek, Romance, Semitic, Slavic, Albanian, Hungarian, Gungbe.

The aim of this Handbook is to provide a forum in which some of the generative syntacticians whose work has had an impact on theoretical syntax over the past 20 years are invited to present their views on one or more aspects of current syntactic theory. The following authors have contributed to the volume: Mark Baker, Michael Brody, Jane Grimshaw, James McCloskey, Jean-Yves Pollock, and Luigi Rizzi. Each contribution focuses on one specific aspect of the grammar. As a general theme, the papers are concerned with the question of the composition of the clause, i.e. what kind of components the clause is made up of, and how these components are put together in the clause. The introduction to the volume provides the backdrop for the papers and highlights some of the developments that have occurred in theoretical syntax in the last ten years. Elements of Grammar is destined for an audience of linguists working in the generative framework.

The aim of this Handbook is to provide a forum in which some of the generative syntacticians whose work has had an impact on theoretical syntax over the past 20 years are invited to present their views on one or more aspects of current syntactic theory. The following authors have contributed to the volume: Mark Baker, Michael Brody, Jane Grimshaw, James McCloskey, Jean-Yves Pollock, and Luigi Rizzi. Each contribution focuses on one specific aspect of the grammar. As a general theme, the papers are concerned with the question of the composition of the clause, i.e. what kind of components the clause is made up of, and how these components are put together in the clause. The introduction to the volume provides the backdrop for the papers and highlights some of the developments that have occurred in theoretical syntax in the last ten years. Elements of Grammar is destined for an audience of linguists working in the generative framework.

While Verb-third (V3) patterns have long been studied in verb-second (V2) languages, a similar pattern in which an initial adverbial constituent is resumed by a clause-internal element has been much less studied. The latter is referred to as 'adverbial resumption' and it also has the character of being a V3 phenomenon. Therefore, the pattern is labelled 'adverbial V3 resumption' or 'adverbial V3.' The present volume is an up-to-date overview of the subject featuring case studies of individual languages that display certain patterns of V3. The authors discuss this pattern in relation to several different languages, addressing among other things issues of microvariation in contemporary varieties and diachronic variation. The book covers Medieval Romance, Old Italian, Old English, diachronic and synchronic varieties of German, varieties of Flemish and Dutch, Icelandic, varieties of Swedish, and Norwegian. Through analyses of adverbial resumptive V3 orders in Germanic and Romance, the contributors explore the nature of V2: while adverbial resumption only occurs in varieties that observe the V2 rule, in itself it leads to apparent violations of linear V2 order, namely to V3 orders. Adverbial Resumption in Verb Second Languages provides comparative analyses which touch upon the nature of sentence-external versus sentence-internal adjuncts, and the fine-grained architecture of the clausal functional hierarchy. These papers constitute a valuable contribution to the theoretically important topics of V2 and V3 that will be of interest to comparative linguists, Germanic linguistics, Romance linguists, and anyone working on formal grammar in general.

In this book Liliane Haegeman presents an account of sentential negation within a Government and Binding framework. Building on the work of Klima and Lasnik, Haegeman demonstrates the parallelism between negative sentences and interrogative sentences, and gives a unified analysis in terms of a well-formedness condition on syntactic representations: the AFFECT criterion, instantiated as the WH-criterion in interrogative sentences and as the NEG-criterion in negative sentences. It is shown that in the same way that in many languages the WH-criterion gives rise to WH-movement, the NEG-criterion may also give rise to NEG-movement. This is particularly clear in the Germanic languages. In the analysis of sentential negation in Romance languages the author makes extensive use of the notion of representational chain, showing that in these languages too the NEG-criterion applies at the level of S-structure. In addition to providing a syntactic analysis of sentential negation the book also raises a number of theoretical issues such as that of the distinction between A-positions and A'-positions and the level of application of well-formedness conditions. This book will be of interest to all those working on theoretical syntax, particularly of the Germanic and Romance languages.

Exploring Nanosyntax provides the first in-depth introduction to the framework of nanosyntax, which originated in the early 2000s as a formal theory of language within Principles and Parameters framework. Deploying a radical implementation of the cartographic "one feature - one head" maxim, the framework provides a fine-grained decomposition of morphosyntactic structure, laying bare the building blocks of the universal functional sequence. This volume makes three contributions: First, it presents the framework's constitutive tools and principles, and explains how nanosyntax relates to cartography and to Distributed Morphology. Second, it illustrates how nanosyntactic tools and principles can be applied to a range of empirical domains of natural language. In doing so, the volume provides a range of detailed crosslinguistic investigations which uncover novel empirical data and which contribute to a better understanding of the functional sequence. Third, specific problems are raised and discussed and new theoretical strands internal to the nanosyntactic framework are explored. Bringing together original contributions by senior and junior researchers in the field, Exploring Nanosyntax offers the first all-encompassing view of this promising framework, making its methodology and exciting results accessible to a wide audience.

Adverbial Clauses, Main Clause Phenomena, and Composition of the Left Periphery uses the cartographic theory to examine the left periphery of the English clause and compare it to the left-peripheral structures of other languages. Liliane Haegeman argues that the dissimilar surface characteristics of these languages (primarily English and Romance, but also Gungbe, Hungarian, Hebrew, Dutch, and others) can be explained by universal constraints, and that the same structures apply across the languages. Haegeman focuses on main clause transformations--movement operations that can only take place in main clauses.

In this book Liliane Haegeman presents an account of sentential negation within a Government and Binding framework. Building on the work of Klima and Lasnik, Haegeman demonstrates the parallelism between negative sentences and interrogative sentences, and gives a unified analysis in terms of a well-formedness condition on syntactic representations: the AFFECT criterion, instantiated as the WH-criterion in interrogative sentences and as the NEG-criterion in negative sentences. It is shown that in the same way that in many languages the WH-criterion gives rise to WH-movement, the NEG-criterion may also give rise to NEG-movement. This is particularly clear in the Germanic languages. In the analysis of sentential negation in Romance languages the author makes extensive use of the notion of representational chain, showing that in these languages too the NEG-criterion applies at the level of S-structure. In addition to providing a syntactic analysis of sentential negation the book also raises a number of theoretical issues such as that of the distinction between A-positions and A'-positions and the level of application of well-formedness conditions. This book will be of interest to all those working on theoretical syntax, particularly of the Germanic and Romance languages.