AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH SYNTAX

An Introduction to English Syntax is intended to present an introduction to syntactic description and analysis in English. The book is designed to serve as a self-contained handbook for students In Linguistics, English, and other related fields who would like to study syntax on their own. Also, teachers of syntax  or English structure may take some relevant units to be part of their materials for a course. The main contents of this book cover basic concepts and indispensable tools of structural analysis, namely word categories, dependency relations, constituent structures, grammatical relations, thematic roles, and voice systems. These notions play important roles in a wide range of syntactic phenomena, such as case marking, agreement, question formation passivization, causativization, and relativization, and they are usually used to provide an account of the syntax  of the world's languages. In the last unit of the book, three major constructions are described, including the relative clause, the existential construction, and the interrogative construction. The three constructions represent non-basic sentence structures which are commonly found, and their similarities and differences between English and other languages clearly reflect unity and diversity of languages.