Analysing English Sentences provides a concise and clear introduction to current work in syntactic theory, drawing on the key concepts of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. Andrew Radford outlines the core concepts and leading ideas and how they can be used to describe various aspects of the syntax of English.

This textbook is a concise, readable introduction to current work in syntactic theory, particularly to Chomsky's Minimalist program. It gives an overview of theoretical concepts and descriptive devices. The discussion is based on varieties of English (Modern Standard, Belfast, Shakespearean, Jamaican Creole) and does not assume prior knowledge of syntax. There are exercises and a glossary. It is an abridged version of Radford's major new textbook Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English: A Minimalist Approach.

In this highly original reanalysis of minimalist syntax, Thomas Stroik considers the optimal design properties for human language. Taking as his starting point Chomsky's minimalist assumption that the syntactic component of a language generates representations for sentences that are interpreted at perceptual and conceptual interfaces, Stroik investigates how these representations can be generated most parsimoniously. Countering the prevailing analyses of minimalist syntax, he argues that the computational properties of human language consist only of strictly local Merge operations that lack both look-back and look-forward properties.

This informative book examines several aspects of the syntax of imperative clauses in English and in a variety of other Germanic languages in the context of the challenge that apparent optional movement poses for the Minimalist Program. At a more general level, the book engages in current debate on one of the key issues in syntactic theory - the motivation for displacement operations in natural language.

Any analysis of the syntax of time is based on a paradox: it must include a syntax-based theory of both tense construal and event construal. Yet while time is undimensional, events have a complex spatiotemporal structure that reflects their human participants. How can an event be flattened to fit into the linear time axis? Chomsky's The Minimalist Program, published in 1995, offers a way to address this problem.