The purpose clause is a common fonn of adverbial modification in English. The bracketed phrases below are purpose clauses, and they look and sound unremarkable. We hear and see these things all the time. John came to play with the children] to play with] I brought John along Insofar as purpose clauses appear to be adverbial, they frequently occupy a relatively low place on the scale of important things for syntactic theory to address itself to. In this book I assume the theoretical framework that has come to be known as 'Government-Binding' theory (GB), initiated in Chomsky (1981). The...

An attempt to view historical phonological change as an ongoing, recurrent process, a phenomenon which the author feels is disguised by too great a reliance upon certain characteristics of the scholarly tradition.