Preface

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.

What the dedicated language student wants, however, is not the ability to analyse complex data from languages in exotic regions of the world, or to produce coherent theories that explain why you can't say his being running in a more elegant way than anyone else can. What they want from linguistics is to see what the subject can offer them in coming to some understanding of how the language that they are studying works. It is for these students that this book has been written.

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.

As part consequence of this, we have adopted a number of strategies. The first is what we call the 'No U-turn' strategy. If you have ever read an introductory book on a linguistic topic you may have found pages and pages of long and complicated arguments as to why a certain phenomena must be analysed in such and such a way, only to find in the next chapter that there is actually a better way of doing things by making certain other assumptions. This is the sort of thing that linguist find fun. But students often find it confusing and frustrating. So we have attempted to write this book without using this strategy. As far as possible, concepts and analyses that are introduced at some point in the book are not altered at some later point in the book. Obviously, pictures have to be painted a bit at a time to make them understandable and so it isn't possible to 'tell the whole truth' right from the start. But an attempt has been made to build up the picture piece by piece, without having to go back and rub out earlier parts of the sketch.

Another strategy adopted in the book is to avoid unnecessary formalisms. These are very useful if you want to understand the workings of a theory to the extent needed to see where its weaknesses are and how it needs to be developed to overcome these. But as this is not our aim, it is not necessary to make students fully aware of how to formalise grammatical principles. All they need is an understanding of how the principles work and what they predict about the language and this can be put over in a less formal way.

The target audience for the book is BA students, covering the introductory syntax level and going through to more advanced BA level material. For this reason, the book starts from the beginning and tries to make as few assumptions as possible about linguistic notions. The first two chapters are a fairly substantial introduction to grammatical concepts both from a descriptive and a theoretical point of view. This material alone, along with the exercises, could form the basis of an introduction to a syntax course. The latter chapters then address specific aspects of the English language and how the concepts and grammatical mechanisms introduced in the first two chapters can be applied to these to enable an understanding of why they are as they are. As the book relies on a 'building' process, starting out at basic concepts and adding to these to enable the adequate description of some quite complex and subtle phenomena, we have also provided an extensive glossary, so that if you happen to forget a concept that was introduced in one part of the book and made use of in another, then it is easy to keep yourself reminded as you read.

Obviously, another feature that we hope is more student-friendly is the exercises, of which we have a substantial amount. These range in type and level, from those which you can use to check your understanding of the text, to those which get you to think about things which follow from the text, but which are not necessarily discussed there. Some are easy and some will make you think. A fairly unique aspect of the book is that it also provides model answers to the exercises so that you can check to see whether you were on the right track with your answer and also for you to learn from: making mistakes is one of the best ways to learn. But if you never know what mistakes you made, you can't learn from them. Obviously, the best way to use the exercises and model answers is to have a go at the exercises by yourself first and then go and read the model answers. While you may be able to learn something by reading the model answers without having a go at the exercises, it is doubtful that you will get as much out of them.

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