This clear and practical introduction to Syntactic Theory introduces students to theory building, hypothesis testing and evaluation through the framework of Chomsky's Government-Binding Theory.
The liberal use of in-text exercises engage the reader at every stage of theory-development, while an 'Open Issue' at the end of each chapter encourages active participation and further exploration of the chapter's topic. With an engaging, informal style, Syntactic Theory makes the most difficult topics accessible to a wide range of students.

The handbook offers an overview of syntactic theory and analysis, in terms of different theories, different languages, and different methods. The Handbook presents the state of art in syntactic analysis, also dealing with the methodology employed, and the rules of argumentation required to achieve such analyses for a wide range of phenomena.

A study of discourse-functional constraints on the use of a marked syntactic construction. Argues that inversion in clauses serves an information-packaging function, linking familiar and unfamiliar information in the discourse. Demonstrates a correlation between a well-defined type of giveness and constituent position within a particular syntactic construction and sheds light on the relationship between information status and word order. Of interest to researchers in syntax and discours

In light of recent claims that complex syntax is not a universal property of all living languages, the issue of how to detect and define syntactic complexity has been revived. This volume contains contributions about the formal complexity of natural language, specific issues of clausal embedding, and syntactic complexity in terms of grammar-external interfaces in the domain of language acquisition.

The book offers a usage-based account of how humans comprehend complex linguistic structures. The author proposes a theory of constructional access, which treats syntactic patterns as complex and abstract signs. In this view, syntactic processing is subject to the very same dynamics as lexical processing and should yield the same type of frequency effects.