English Syntax is an authoritative, self-contained introduction to the subject for students who have had no prior coursework in syntactic theory. The detailed revisions throughout this new edition are aimed at increasing its clarity and usefulness. There are changes in almost every chapter, including a large number of new exercises and several new subsections. In addition there are two new appendixes, the first sketching the relation of English syntax to the wider field of generative syntactic theory, the second summarizing the basic syntactic structures discussed in the body of...

This collection of articles and associated discussion papers focuses on a problem that has attracted increasing attention from linguists and psychologists throughout the world during the past several years. Reduced to essentials, the problem is that of discovering the character of the mental capacities that make it possible for human beings to attain knowledge of their language on the basis of fragmentary and haphazard early linguistic experience. A fundamental assumption running through all of these contributions is that people possess strong innate predispositions that are critical for...