Syntax: An Introduction to Minimalism

Using a concise and clear style, this book highlights insights from current syntactic theory and minimalism. Chapter 1 starts with the general idea behind generative grammar and should be read from a big picture perspective. Because the book expects no prior syntactic background, its next two chapters are on lexical and grammatical categories and on basic phrase structure rules. After these introductory chapters, the book covers the clausal spine, the VP, TP, and CP in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, respectively. For the VP, it emphasizes lexical aspect, theta-roles, and the VP-shell; for the TP and CP, it uses a cartographic approach and juxtaposes that to free adjunction. Chapter 7 covers the DP and Chapter 8 discusses the importance of features. Chapter 9 returns to some of the issues raised in Chapter 1 and summarizes the approach. It includes keywords, frequent summaries, exercises, and suggested answers to the exercises. Cartoons and frequent corpus examples enliven the text.