Thinking Syntactically: A Guide to Argumentation and Analysis

by Liliane Haegeman

Overview

Thinking 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781405118538
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	10/14/2005
Series:	Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics , #20
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 9.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Liliane Haegeman is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Lille and a member of the CNRS research group SILEX. Her numerous works include Introduction to Government and Binding Theory (second edition, Blackwell, 1994) and English Grammar: A Generative Perspective (with Jacqueline Guéron; Blackwell, 1999).

Table of Contents

Preface 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

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"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