Basic English Syntax with Exercises

Abstract

Linguists, it has to be admitted, are strange animals. They get very excited about things that the rest of the species seem almost blind to and fail to see what all the fuss is about. This wouldn’t be so bad if linguists were an isolated group. But they are not, and what’s more they have to teach non-linguists about their subject. One mistake that linguists often make is to assume that to teach linguistics, students should be instilled with the kind of enthusiasm for the subject that linguists themselves have. But not everybody wants to be a linguist and, as a friend of mine once said, not everybody can be a linguist. This is not to say that this is not a linguistics text. It is, and linguistics permeates every single page. But the difference is that it is not trying to tell you how to become a linguist – and what things to get excited about – but what linguistic theory has to offer for the understanding of the English language. Many introductory text books in syntax use language data as a way of justifying the theory, so what they are about is the linguistic theory rather than the language data itself. A book which was about language would do things differently; it would use the theory to justify a certain view of the language under study. We have attempted to write such a book.