welcome, students and teachers and DIYers!

I wrote this book for my beginning syntax students. But since I believe that my students are no different from any other English‐speakers studying syntax for the first time, this book is for all those people out there who have no background in this area but who want to learn. The reader I have in mind has never thought about syntax and doesn’t know anything about grammar. Maybe you’ve never been taught anything substantive about grammar in primary or secondary school, and maybe you just have a few preconceived notions about English grammar which amount to no more than deep‐seated, culturally‐based dogmas, like “ain’t isn’t a word,” or “two negatives make a positive.” You might not even be sure what it means to say that “two negatives make a positive,” or if you are, perhaps you secretly wonder why the latter is patently not true for languages like Spanish and Italian (and so why would it be true for English?). You may be an undergraduate or MA student studying to be an English Language Arts teacher and feel insecure about your knowledge in this area and want to change that. Perhaps you’ve heard of “syntactic trees” but have never drawn one and wonder if you can learn to do it. You might have tried to read a more advanced book on the subject (and were intrigued) but thought you’d do better if you could start at a more basic level. Maybe you have no self‐confidence with grammatical terms like object, verb, preposition, relative clause, pronoun, tense, intransitive, accusative, and the like, but you want to build your confidence up. Or you might be a budding computer scientist who wants a basic understanding of the structure of natural language. Whatever your personal goals, fears, desires, insecurities, or curiosities are as a beginning syntax student — and whether you’re in a class, or you simply want to learn on your own — this book welcomes you with open arms.

what you already bring to this book

Like many linguists, I take sentence structure to be a product of the human mind. This book is therefore designed to bring into your consciousness knowledge which you already have. If you’re reading this book, you know English, so you’re already an authority on the subject. If you’ve been speaking English as one of your native languages since childhood, this book helps you use this native knowledge to your advantage, to learn about syntax. If English is not your only native language, your other languages will give you even more power to learn. Those of you who instead came to learn English as an older child (or as an early teen or adult) will also bring to the table tools you already have at your disposal from the different languages you speak.

this book and variation in English world‐wide

Since there are so many different “Englishes” spoken in the world, I can’t anticipate what variety of English (or, which English dialect) you’re a personal authority on. So while I can push you to tap into your individual knowledge, the existing regional and sociolinguistic variation dictate that each reader will have a different understanding of what is possible and what is not possible in their own English.

To give just a few very simple examples: some English speakers use the reflexive pronoun theirselves while others use only themselves, for the “third plural.” The form theirselves is consistent with myself, yourself, and herself (because their, my, your, and her are all possessive pronouns). The form themselves is consistent with himself and herself (because him and her are accusative pronouns). Thus, both uses are perfectly logical and rule‐governed, and the variation exists precisely because of this. (You’ll learn more about reflexives in Chapter 7.)

Similarly, for embedded questions, some speakers might use “subject–auxiliary inversion” (as in Mary wondered what wouldSue fix next), where the word order is would > Sue, while other speakers might not, as in Mary wondered what Suewould fix next (where the word order is Sue > would). Again, the variation exists precisely because both uses are perfectly logical and rule‐governed. (You’ll learn more about embedded questions and why grammatical structure gives rise to these variant possibilities in Chapters 5 and 11.)

Likewise, for the verb to run, some people predominantly use the form run for the past tense (Sue run to school this morning), while others are more likely to use the form ran (Sue ran to school this morning). Use of the form run as the past tense of to run is consistent with use of the form put as the past tense of to put (Sue already put her tools away). On the other hand, use of the form ran as the past tense of to run is consistent with use of the form dug as the past tense of to dig (Sue dug a hole to plant the azalea). There are thus systematic reasons for either choice, and therefore this book has to take such syntactic variation into account. (You’ll learn more about verb forms in Chapter 8.)

But since it’s completely impossible to cover all the existing variation in one book, the reader should not expect comprehensive coverage in this regard. Nevertheless, the book includes enough analysis of variation across the United States and in the world to provide the reader with the necessary tools to analyze their own English, even if there’s a particular regional or social variant that you realize you use which I haven’t been able to cover. My main concern is for you to use whatever English(es) you know as a vehicle to learn about the complexities of sentence structure. This is one of the features of this book which makes it a fit for Wiley’s series Linguistics in the World.

features of this book

Since the primary purpose of this book is to get the beginning student comfortable with syntactic analysis, it doesn’t adopt the most current phrase structure theories. If you’ve never thought about grammar in your life, I don’t believe that it helps you to use more advanced tools to introduce basic concepts. This is because there are features of more advanced tools whose motivation you can only genuinely understand once you’ve first had enough practice with the more fundamental principles of sentence structure. For example: one of the most basic skills to develop when learning syntax for the first time is the ability to properly analyze constituent structure. It’s essential to automatize (= to make automatic) your ability to recognize the hierarchical relationships between major sentential constituents and to become comfortable talking about them using the language of syntax. This takes practice with basic tools. Such skills can’t be developed overnight, and it isn’t always productive to try to build up such basic skills with advanced phrase structure theories whose complexity relies on an already automatized facility with the basics. Perhaps you’ve seen structures in some introductory textbooks that utilize more current theories of phrase structure involving “bar‐levels,” like those I introduce in Section 11.4. In my own experience, if a student new to syntax is asked from the start to draw trees using bar‐levels — when they haven’t yet automatized the ability to pick out lexical categories or major sentential constituents — then their ability to manipulate bar‐levels can become just an exercise in guesswork (at worst), or an exercise in manipulating a system without appreciating the motivation for it (at best). A student’s well‐meaning desire to “get the bar‐levels right” (for example, to make their teacher happy) can result in focusing their energies on the wrong thing, such that development of the more foundational skills ends up getting neglected. So while the phrase structure rules I use in this book might seem outdated to syntactic theorists of today, I assure the reader that I use these tools for very specific pedagogical purposes. Once you work through this book, you’ll be ready to really appreciate the elegance of more advanced theories of phrase structure, like that presented in Liliane Haegeman’s Introduction to Government and Binding Theory or Andrew Carnie’ Syntax: A Generative Introduction, which you will find referenced later.

As you work through this book, you will develop different kinds of skills simultaneously. You’ll become an adept analyzer of more and more complex structures. This in turn means that you’ll develop a greater and greater appreciation of the fact that sentence structure is a product of the human mind. You’ll see that the “rules” we’re using are not something out there in the world, created by some authority outside of your own brain: rather, they represent the grammatical rules that are part of your own (unconscious) structural instincts. This book will engage you in a discovery process in which you’ll learn how to best create tools that accurately capture what we do as humans, and you’ll thus develop a greater appreciation of linguistics as a cognitive science. As you proceed, you’ll also come to appreciate syntax as an object of scientific inquiry and develop methodologies which are applicable to other STEM disciplines. In some English classes you’ve taken, you might have been told “there is no right or wrong answer.” But when you approach human language as part of the natural world (like you would mammalian vision, for example), sometimes there simply is a right answer and a wrong answer, and these can be ascertained via scientific methods. You will learn how to form hypotheses that make predictions, and to develop the skill of testing to see whether the predictions of a particular hypothesis are borne out, which in turn tells you what the right and wrong answers are. It can be a thoroughly satisfying enterprise to develop the power to determine what the correct analysis is for a given structure, based on the simple idea that certain hypotheses make predictions which we can see are borne out with empirical evidence, while other hypotheses must be rejected, because they make incorrect predictions.

Note that, because of the pedagogical purpose of this book, I mix and match historical stages of phrase structure theory. The student should thus take this book as an amalgam of what I believe to be some of the “greatest hits” of syntax, suitable for a beginner’s consumption. Relatedly, the reader should understand that most of the ideas presented in this book do not originate with me. While the selection, packaging, and presentation of the material are particular to this work, most of the concepts themselves come from decades of research in syntactic theory (in some cases), or even thousands of years of research in grammar (in other cases). The concepts I discuss (such as lexical categories like Noun and Verb) are so entrenched in our understanding of grammar and syntax that authors who write about these concepts present them as general knowledge, and rightly so. But this should not detract from the fact that all ideas have their origins somewhere, and the more recent the concept or analysis, the easier it can be to trace it back to a specific scientist or group of scientists. Where possible, I make reference to the relevant literature at the end of some of the chapters, to give a flavor of this, and also with an eye towards directing you to further reading.

How to use this book

This book is designed like a DIY manual. This means it can be used in many different ways: teachers can use it to learn how to teach others; teachers can use it in the classroom with students; or students can use it to teach themselves. In order for learning to be successful, though, the reader needs to take the design seriously.

Exercises: You’ll notice that there are no exercises at the end of each chapter. This is because I don’t believe you should be waiting until the end of the chapter to practice your skills. Rather, since each skill follows from the previously developed one, the reader will be most successful only if they do each exercise right at the point where I put it. If you see an exercise and think you don’t need to do it in order to move on to the next paragraph, you do so at your own risk, and I can’t guarantee you’ll properly develop the skills and attain the knowledge that this book is designed to give you. Of course, stopping to do the exercises along the way means that it’ll take longer to read each chapter. But this will be an investment worth making. So try to resist the temptation to take short‐cuts!

Side notes and term boxes: In addition to the exercises, information is hierarchized through the use of two different kinds of text box: the Side Note and the Term Box. The side note is designed to help you make your way through a streamlined text, with elaborations, additions, opportunities, and notes visually presented as asides. You don’t want to skip the side notes, but at the same time, you can wait until you’re done with a particular section before going back to read them. The term box is a way to keep you on track with the new terms you’re learning. In case you forget what a term means, or need elaboration that goes beyond what I said about a term bolded in the text, you can avail yourself of the term box. At the end of each chapter, I provide a list of terms/concepts that appeared in the text, the term boxes, the side notes, and the exercises to help keep you on track.

By the end of the book, if you did everything you were guided to do, you’ll be able to converse intelligently with a syntactician about the basics of how humans unconsciously structure sentences. When finished with this book — or a course based on this book — you’ll be prepared to take a more advanced course on syntactic theory. I’ve been using drafts of the chapters from this book in my classes for many years, to test run them on my own students, in order to see what works and what doesn’t. If you’re a teacher who’s thinking of using this book in a class, my own experience suggests that you can use the book to run your class in the following way: For a single week (whether your class meets once a week for 3 or 4 hours, or twice a week for 1.5 to 2 hours), direct your students to read a chapter and do all the exercises, in preparation for the class meeting in which that particular chapter is to be discussed for the first time. Then, in class, invite your students to raise which questions in each exercise they’d like to go over. You may find that you can cover approximately a chapter a week in this way without any lecture preparation involved. Of course, this depends on the chapter in question, the teacher, the students, the time you have, and the purpose of the class. For example, it’s possible to get though Chapters 1 and 2 in a single week, if you put aside Section 2.4. It’s also possible to get through Chapter 5 in a week, if you put aside Section 5.4. Chapter 6 tends to take longer (often, it takes me two weeks to cover it), because relative clauses take a while for students to absorb, given their semantic complexity. Chapters 3, 4, and 7, on the other hand, each tend to fit comfortably within one week.

It is my belief, though, that the differences in pace that teachers in different contexts experience won’t diminish the learning process for the students. If you’re a student training to be a teacher in Adolescence Education and you use this book to learn grammar/syntax, you may very well find yourself able to bring the lessons contained herein to your own junior high or high school classes that you teach. Many of my own students have gone on to successful careers in teaching English Language Arts and have reported that eighth graders are capable of grasping the material. It seems that they get a kick out of tree‐drawing, often treating it as a fun game.

However you choose to use this book, I wish you the very best in your journey of discovery, and I hope you come to embrace syntax as a thing of beauty in the natural world.