Affiliation:
1. Teachers College, Columbia University, USA
Abstract
This chapter surveys the basics of the syntax of main clauses, with special attention to English. Readers are guided through the process of doing syntactic analysis with the aid of syntactic trees that model the properties of linearity, hierarchy, and recursion that characterize the syntax of human languages. The model used is a somewhat simplified version of X-bar syntax, which is currently the best-known and best-tested model of phrase structure within the subfield of syntax and which combines the virtues of simplicity, breadth, and predictive power. There is a section on the theory of grammatical relations and its relationship to phrase structure theory, as well as a section providing an overview of basic world constituent orders.
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