With the exception of the Preface and Chapter I, this Synopsis of English Syntax was presented to the University of Michigan as a doctoral dissertation in 1943. It is obviously a precarious undertaking to publish a scientific work so many years after it was written. So much takes place in the present-day development of any science, and surely Descriptive Linguistics is no exception. Indeed, in this field particularly there have been almost unprecedented advances both in theory and methodology. One thing: If we’re going to rewrite this dissertation it would be in many respects quite different.
Any present treatment of English syntax, such as was attempted in this Synopsis, would have to pay much greater attention to intonation, which is here treated only under Bloomfield's taxeme of "modulation".
The consistent and careful notation of intonational structures would have both clarified a number of structures and provided criteria for distinguishing otherwise confusing patterns.
The present Synopsis is also lacking in a systematic analysis of phonemic junctures, both actual and potential. Such features would have provided important diagnostic, though not necessarily definitive, criteria for many immediate-constituent divisions.
However, in 1943 the significance of junctures was only being initially explored, and since that time their relevance for any grammatical treatment of English has been fully attested.
On the basis of the extent to which this Synopsis would require changing to bring it into line with contemporary developments in descriptive linguistics, it is legitimate to ask why it is being republished, especially since the original work was not intended for publication (which would have required fuller explanations of many technical terms, a more extensive introduction, and many more notes).
The truth is that, quite contrary to expectation, there has been a consistent demand for copies of this dissertation. It has been put out in two multilith editions of several hundred copies each, and more recently was in part published in Japan, with a special introduction and notes in Japanese. The reasons for this interest are probably twofold:
(1) it is still the most extensive synopsis of English constructions described in terms of immediate constituents, and
(2) it contains many useful lists of words functioning as syntactic classes.
