Preface

This book is an introduction to syntactic analysis that is concerned with basic concepts of sentence structure and how they apply in the analysis of sentences and their constituent parts. It covers the standard core phenomena: the internal structure of phrases headed by nouns, verbs, prepositions, adjectives, etc.; the structure of coordinate and subordinate clauses; word order variation across languages; displacement (movement) involving interrogative phrases (wh-movement), verbal heads (head movement), non-interrogative nominal phrases (NP-movement), and clauses; and ellipsis. In addition, a significant part of the discussion deals with the morphosyntactic topics of Case and agreement, and the lexical semantic topic of argument structure. These topics demonstrate the centrality of the lexicon for any theory of syntax. Thus one of the fundamental questions for syntactic analysis is how the lexicon interfaces with a syntactic computational system that constructs linguistic expressions out of individual lexical items. This book is based on the answer that emerged over fifteen years ago under the Minimalist Program. It involves a single minimal operation Merge that combines two syntactic objects into a single new syntactic object.

Much of the data comes from English, but crucial examples from a range of other languages are utilized, including French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Irish, and Welsh. To a large extent these data are fortuitous, so it should be possible for the reader (and especially the instructor who is using this book) to provide additional evidence from a wide range of additional languages.