This volume of the History of the English Language encompasses three centuries of immense cultural change, from Caxton in the late Middle Ages to the American Declaration of Independence and the beginnings of Romanticism. During this period, Middle English became Early Modern English and then developed into the early stages of indisputably "modern" English. This book traces developments in orthography and punctuation, phonology and morphology, syntax, lexis and semantics, regional and social variation, and the literary language.
This introductory text takes a novel approach to the study of syntax. Grammar as Science offers an introduction to syntax as an exercise in scientific theory construction. Syntax provides an excellent instrument for introducing students from a wide variety of backgrounds to the principles of scientific theorizing and scientific thought; it engages general intellectual themes present in all scientific theorizing as well as those arising specifically within the modern cognitive sciences.
This collection of seven papers studies important aspects of the syntax of Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Rumanian from a comparative perspective based on current linguistic frameworks, including the Minimalist Program. Topics addressed include control, raising, and obviation, negation, noun phrase structure, clitic pronouns, and verb movement.
Verb First: On The Syntax Of Verb-Initial Languages
This collection of papers brings together the most recent crosslinguistic research on the syntax of verb-initial languages. Authors with a variety of theoretical perspectives pursue the questions of how verb-initial order is derived, and how these derivations play into the characteristic syntax of these languages. Major themes in the volume include the role of syntactic category in languages with verb-initial order; the different mechanisms of deriving V-initial order; and the universal correlates of the order.
This really is one of the best books about linguistics ever written--maybe the best. As a linguist, it brought me to a whole new level of insight about my field. I wish I'd read it before I ever started graduate school, instead of afterwards--every graduate student should read this before taking their first syntax course. I managed to make it through six years of graduate school without ever understanding why people found syntax and semantics interesting; this book helped me to understand why they did.
