English Syntax

C.L. Baker

• 06 december 1989
• 9780262022873

Samenvatting:

This work is designed to be used as a textbook in a basic course in English syntax at either the undergraduate level or the beginning graduate level. The book is self-contained, presupposing no prior coursework in English syntax or in linguistics. | The approach to English syntax that is followed in this book has its roots in the discipline of linguistics. As with linguistic work in general, the main goal is not so much prescriptive as descriptive. Thus, unlike many traditional school grammars, this book is not primarily concerned with defining proper English usage. Instead, it takes the English language as it is used today and attempts to describe the way in which its sentences are formed. As a consequence of this orientation, virtually no attention is given to sentences such as Bob was setting on his bed and John and me fed the pigeons, where the usages of individual speakers are not always in agreement. By contrast, a great deal of time will be spent on trying to understand the structure of uncontroversially acceptable sentences, such as Joe asked Martha to tell him where to put the chair and There seems to be a fly in your soup. The fact that this book has a descriptive rather than prescriptive orientation is enough to give it a strongly linguistic character. More narrowly, it falls squarely within the spirit of a particular approach to linguistics known as the generative approach. This approach, which was pioneered by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technol ogy in the middle and late 1950s, has become far and away the most widely followed method for the study of syntax. The central premise is that a person's fluency in a language rests on a largely unconscious knowledge of a vast system of rules that define the well-formed structures of the language. Itis then the primary business of the linguist to try to determine what these unconscious rules are for the language that he or she is Studying.