Jim Miller An Introduction to English Syntax (original) (raw)
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A Preliminary Understanding of English Syntax
2012
One of the crucial functions of any human language, such as English or Korean, is to convey various kinds of information from the everyday to the highly academic. Language provides a means for us to describe how to cook, how to remove cherry stains, how to understand English grammar, or how to provide a convincing argument. We commonly consider certain properties of language to be key essential features from which the basic study of linguistics starts.
2008
There is a tendency in science to proceed from descriptive methods towards an adequate explanatory theory and then move beyond its conclusions. Our purpose is to discover the concepts of computational efficiency in natural language that exclude redundancy, and to investigate how these relate to more general principles. By developing the idea that linguistic structures possess the features of other biological systems this article focuses on the third factor that enters into the growth of language in the individual. It is suggested that the core principles of grammar can be observed in nature itself. The Faculty of Language is an efficient mechanism designed for the continuation of movement in compliance with optimization requirements. To illustrate that, a functional explanation of syntactic Merge is offered in this work, and an attempt is made to identify some criteria that single out this particular computational system as species-specific.
Anglia, 2018
A Critical Account of English Syntax offers 17 chapters that come for the most part in alphabetical order, followed by notes (281-290), a surprisingly short bibliography (291-293) and an index (294-296). 1 Keith Brown and Jim Miller's book is ambitious as regards all the aspects that it intends to cover as well as all the things that the book does not want to be: it is neither a teaching grammar, nor a reference grammar, nor a corpus grammar, nor does it cover the scope of CGEL (1985) or CamG (2002) or even of Huddleston and Pullum (2005) (1 f.). The book is "a discursive and descriptive account of several major areas of English syntax, of the role of syntactic constructions in text and of the interaction between textual imperatives and the use of old or new structures with a new set of lexical items" (2). It takes into consideration that there is a vast number of varieties of English in the world, and "that spoken and written language are equally worthy of attention" (4) though at "the centre of each topic is standard written British English" (7). Data was collected via intuition, observation and digital corpora (readers interested in more detail may refer to 7 f.). The intended audience of A Critical Account of English Syntax is huge: senior, undergraduate or postgraduate students taking degrees in English Language and Linguistics, lecturers and scholars of linguistics, teachers in primary or secondary schools and teachers of English as
On Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
Inference: International Review of Science
In the first essay for a new series on landmark texts, Anna Maria Di Sciullo revisits Noam Chomsky’s classic Aspects on the Theory of Syntax. Published in 1965, Aspects was a revelation, presenting linguists with what, at once, became the Standard Theory. It promoted linguistics into a science, one that accepted the methods and the standards of the hard sciences themselves.
English syntax: An introduction
2008
One important aspect of teaching English syntax (to native and nonnative undergraduate students alike) involves the balance in the overall approach between facts and theory. We understand that one important goal of teaching English syntax to undergraduate students is to help students enhance their understanding of the structure of English in a systematic and scientific way. Basic knowledge of this kind is essential for students to move on the next stages, in which they will be able to perform linguistic analyses for simple as well as complex English phenomena. This new introductory textbook has been developed with this goal in mind. The book focuses primarily on the descriptive facts of English syntax, presented in a way that encourages students to develop keen insights into the English data. It then proceeds with the basic, theoretical concepts of generative grammar from which students can develop abilities to think, reason, and analyze English sentences from linguistic points of view.