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This paper is intended as an introduction to syntax. Borrowing from Chomsky's Government & Binding and Principles & Parameters frameworks (Chomsky, 1986, 1992, 1995), various aspects of syntactic theory are described. These include lexical, functional, and phrasal categories and how they are put together into clauses and sentences, how words are represented in the mental lexicon, how lexical properties project to the syntax, and how noun phrases are assigned structural and semantic information. Additionally, how sentences that are not canonically ordered are derived and represented, how and to what do pronouns refer, and the principles that connect all these theoretical notions to form knowledge of language are described. The paper concludes with a summary of work in normal and disordered language, including treatment of language disorders, that has exploited aspects of the syntactic theory described in this paper. KEY WORDS: syntax, linguistics, language
Within theoretical linguistics, syntax is the study of the architecture of phrases, clauses, and sentences. The modern roots of the study of syntax can be traced to the pioneering work of Noam Chomsky, who in 1957 wrote Syntactic Structures. Chomsky changed the face of linguistics by casting its domain inwardly. That is, the concern shifted from describing external language phenomena to characterizing the mental machinery that purported to explain the native speakers' knowledge of language; that concern remains today. In this summary I borrow rather heavily from Chomsky's GovernmentBinding Theory and Principles and Parameters (Chomsky, 1986, 1992).1
The proper study of (introductory) syntax could easily take up the entire body of a large text (e.g., Haegeman, 1992; Radford, 1988; van Riemsdijk & Williams, 1986). Because this paper is intended as a tutorial, it will emphasize constructs that will help the reader understand the general nature of syntactic theorizing without being too concerned with theory-internal issues; the paper also emphasizes those aspects of syntactic theory that are relevant to research in normal and disordered language performance in children and adults. Leonard and Loeb (1988) previously cut a similar path in their tutorial on Government-Binding theory. The present paper is intended as an update to that effort as well as a more detailed examination of syntactic theory.
So far as the intended audience is concerned, this paper is not necessarily directed toward those...