Bibliography

Papers and books (other than the textbook) that we will use will be listed here. If these are readings you're being asked to do, they can be left outside my office for you to borrow, photocopy, and return in a timely manner.

Other sources of information. This year, I've selected the textbook by David Adger because I think it explains things pretty well, and still manages to cover a fair amount of relatively "cutting edge" syntactic theory. There are a couple of other "standard" textbooks that you might wish to look at, however, if you want to hear things said in a different way. Be warned however: Syntax is not completely consistent (particularly in terminology and notation, but also in the underlying assumptions made) across syntacticians, and the hypotheses have been refined over the years. So if you look at a different textbook (particularly if you look at a book from several years ago), you may find that it refers to certain things in a slightly different way from the Adger textbook. This is not bad, although you might find it to be confusing. It is character-building to look at these other books and try to understand how the terminology you find there can be translated into the terminology we are using in class, but it is to a certain extent not for the faint of heart.

Andrew Carnie (2001). Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell. This textbook has been the textbook of the course before. It is easy to read and accessible and pretty much consistent. It is, however, pretty basic. It contains a couple of chapters on some "other views" of syntax which we will not cover, but which you might find interesting anyway. One thing which I consider to be a deficiency of this book is that it does not really discuss the concept of "government", and because of this, it does not really cover Binding Theory or Case Theory in almost any detail. I think that these are important to know something about when trying to read articles from the literature (although I at least partly understand Carnie's motivation for doing this, since the cutting edge research in syntax has turned to an approach which tries to do what "government" did in other ways). Note: there is a second edition of this book available now, maybe I will add a note or two hereabout that at somet point.

Andrew Radford (1997a). Syntactic theory and the structure of English: A minimalist approach . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This has been the textbook of the course before. It is at roughly the same level as the Adger book, but the technology in the Adger book is perhaps a bit clearer. Both Adger's book and Radford's 1997 book are set in terms of a generally "minimalist" theory, and much of what they discuss is compatible. I think people found it a little bit confusing and it is not entirely internally consistent from cover to cover.

Andrew Radford (1997b). Syntax: A minimalist introduction . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This is just an abridged version of Radford (1997a). The abridged one is purple and green, the unabridged one is red.

Jamal Ouhalla (1999). Introducing Transformational Grammar: From Principles and Parameters to Minimalism (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. This textbook has been used in the past for Syntax I. My experience with it was overall not very positive; it is often not very good about defining its terms before using them, and it tends to bring in a lot of technical information sometimes unnecessarily. It also seems not entirely consistent from chapter to chapter about what it is assuming. However, on the plus side, it does get into things quite a bit more deeply than the Carnie textbook does, and it does cover the traditional topics in government, Binding Theory, and Case. If you are interested in looking at this book, you might also be interested in looking at the handouts from Fall 2000's Syntax I class, which are primarily based on this book.

Liliane Haegeman (1994). Introduction to Government and Binding Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Before Ouhalla's book, Haegeman's book was the standard Syntax I textbook, and still is for many people. Some people really like this book a lot and find it very clear, although others have found it uninspiring too. I would probably suggest looking at this book first, before looking at Ouhalla's book, although it is perhaps slightly more dated. It is quite thorough and gives a lot more in the way of examples of each point than you'll find in Carnie's book.

Liliane Haegeman and Jacqueline Guéron (1999) English Grammar: A Generative Perspective. Oxford: Blackwell. I haven't reviewed this book very carefully yet. I think it has a lot in common with Haegeman's previous textbook, but presumably focused more on English.

Andrew Radford (1988). Transformational Grammar: A First Course. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Before Haegeman's book, for many years, Radford's little red textbook was the standard Syntax textbook. In Linguistics terms, 1988 was a long time ago, and a lot has happened in the interim. So, Radford's book is somewhat out of date in certain areas, but he covers constituency tests and the basics of X-bar structure in a very thorough and accessible way. Many of today's professional syntacticians learned syntax with this textbook, so how bad can it be? Incidentally, Radford has two new textbooks too (one is a subset of the other, they both have "Minimalist" in the title), but I am not very familiar with these, and they represent a fairly significant leap ahead to cutting edge syntax (which, although it provides the most modern outlook, I suspect that it won't be as useful when trying to read the existing literature; moreover, Carnie's book, while not explicitly a minimalist introduction, is very minimalism-conscious, and what you learn in Carnie's book will basically be still valid as you learn more about minimalism. Syntax II will cover the advances represented by minimalist syntax at least in part).

Ian Roberts (1997). Comparative Syntax. London: Edwin Arnold. This has been used as the "textbook" for Syntax II for a couple of years; it tends to presuppose a basic comfort level with syntax and then introduces components of current syntax in fairly understandable terms. I found it to be quite readable, though, so you might even consider not waiting until Syntax II to read it.

Peter W. Culicover (1997). Principles and Parameters: An Introduction to Syntactic Theory. I haven't reviewed this book very thoroughly, but it appears as if it would be a good technical reference book. It looks a little bit short on the friendly step-by-step introductory material, and seems to jump right in to the difficult issues, but that might make it an excellent secondary source.

Donna Jo Napoli (1993). Syntax: Theory and Problems. Oxford: Oxford University Press. I am not particularly familiar with this book, but I do know that it takes a somewhat different approach to the topic (not entirely unlike Carnie's approach, though). It is written in a very "conversational" way, and it is quite data-oriented. If you look at this book, let me know what you think; I don't have a very good idea about what student reactions have been to it at this point.