with Marcela Depiante and Arthur Stepanov

This book provides an introduction to some classic ideas and analyses of transformational generative grammar, viewed both on their own terms and from a more modern, or minimalist perspective. The major focus is on the set of analyses treating English verbal morphology. The book shows how the analyses in Chomsky's classic Syntactic Structures actually work, filling in underlying assumptions and often unstated formal particulars. From there the book moves to successive theoretical developments and revisions -- both in general and...

This book clarifies some of the central issues in Japanese syntax, pointing the way to solving several long-standing problems. It presents an alternative to the Standard Theory, a model which has dominated Japanese linguistics for a number of years.Following the study of the syntactic and lexical levels of representation in Japanese, the book brings the same theoretical perspective to bear on English. Although Japanese, a so-called nonconfigurational language, is typologically far removed from Indo-European languages, Farmer shows that Modular Grammar, which was primarily developed to...