Description
Book SynopsisThinking Syntactically: A Guide to Argumentation and Analysis is a textbook designed to teach introductory students the skills of relating data to theory and theory to data.
- Helps students develop their thinking and argumentation skills rather than merely introducing them to one particular version of syntactic theory.
- Structured around a wide range of exercises that use clear and compelling logic to build arguments and lead up to theoretical proposals.
- Data drawn from current media sources, including newspapers, books, and television programs, to help students formulate and test hypotheses.
- Generative in spirit, but does not focus on specific theoretical approaches but enables students to understand and evaluate different approaches more easily.
- Written by an established author with an international reputation.
Trade Review"This is a strikingly original book. With her usual flair and a host of attested examples, Liliane Haegeman has provided a painless and perceptive introduction to the science of syntax." Neil Smith, University College London "Linguists' partners complain that they pay no attention to what they say, only to how they say it. Haegeman makes a virtue of this, shows where it leads and how remarkable the human capacity for language is once one thinks of it formally. She has a wonderful eye and many of her examples are drawn from newspapers and novels." David Lightfoot, National Science Foundation, Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences
Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments vi
1 Introduction: The Scientific Study of Language 1
Discussion 1
Exercises 47
2 Diagnostics for Syntactic Structure 65
Discussion 65
Exercises 123
3 Lexical Projections and Functional Projections 155
Discussion 155
Exercises 210
4 Refining Structures: From One Subject Position to Many 237
Discussion 237
Exercises 268
5 The Periphery of the Sentence 305
Discussion 305
Exercises 354
Bibliography 370
Index 381
