Thinking Syntactically

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.

Preface.

1: Introduction: The Scientific Study of Language.

Discussion.

Exercises.

2: Diagnostics for Syntactic Structure.

Discussion.

Exercises.

3: Lexical Projections and Functional Projections.

Discussion.

Exercises.

4: Refining Structures: From One Subject Position to Many.

Discussion.

Exercises.

5: The Periphery of the Sentence.

Discussion.

Exercises.

Bibliography.

Index.

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). Thinking Syntactically takes a new approach to teaching introductory students the skills of relating data to theory and theory to data. The main goal of the book is to create a mindset for scientific thinking and gives students a heightened sensitivity to language that empowers them to go beyond the material taught in class. Though generative in spirit, this textbook does not focus on teaching the details of a specific theoretical approach, but rather enables students to understand and evaluate different approaches more easily.

The book is structured around a wide range of exercises that use clear and compelling logic to build arguments and lead up to theoretical proposals. Each step is conceptually and empirically motivated to cultivate the argumentation skills of the reader. Using data drawn from current media sources including newspapers and novels, Liliane Haegeman helps students formulate and test hypotheses.

"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