Customer Reviews

Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an excellent book for the study of syntactic theory/generative grammar. I'd taken an introductory (undergrad) course in sociolinguistics and wanted to find out about some of the other areas of linguistics, so this is one of the books I bought (along with Noam Chomsky's, which are a must). This book is all-around excellent. It gives a nice little history of linguistics in the intro for those of us who haven't studied it in great detail, and it really starts out with the basics, and provides lots of important examples, making it very easy to pick up on. Most importantly, it doesn't STAY simple - the learning curve in this book seems to work very well. If you enjoy thinking and learning about language, you will love this book. Especially good for computer scientists/math people (I am a CS major).

This book presents a pedagogically simplified version of HPSG, a formal grammar theory, as applied to English. This is a kind of constraint- or unification-based theory of grammar, but not the only one, as the reviewer below seems to think. And I believe that by "credible", he must mean "popular".

The big strength of this book is its formal clarity. HPSG is one of those few linguistic theories which achieves almost complete formal clarity without becoming nearly incomprehensible (as compared to, say, many versions of Categorial Grammar). The theory is explicit enough to be implemented in a computer program-- and it actually had been implemented (...). No other introductory syntax textbook I am aware of can boast of this, and this gains it 4 stars.

The problem is that this results in much more space (and student effort) spent in understanding the technical details of the theory, to the detriment of actually understanding the subject matter of syntax. The syntax of languages other than English is treated only marginally, through problem sets (though in all fairness, some of the problems, e.g. the one on reflexives in Japanese vs. English, are based on serious and subtle differences between the languages).
But even for English syntax, the complexity of detail of the theory is too much for first-time students, who can't really appreciate the why of the analyses in the first place.

In short, this book is perfect as either a gentle introduction to HPSG, for undergrads that have had a good introduction to syntax before and need to be introduced to a good formal framework, or for syntax courses with a computational emphasis where covering a grammar that has been implemented is a major factor. As a first textbook in syntax, it fails; I would rather use something like Robert Van Valin's "An Introduction to Syntax" .

For starters: the title is a bit misleading, it should contain the words 'Unification Grammar', because that is the only theory covered in this book. People who aren't familiar with linguistics might think this is THE syntactic theory, but in fact there are many (some of which are much more credible than Unification Grammar). But apart from the fact that UG is not my cup of tea, the book is ok. Not outstanding, but ok. It more or less covers the basics of UG in an easy-to-learn-way. The many feature structures are a big help too, even though the authors do make several crucial faults in some of them! Anyway, the book did for me what it was supposed to do, which was understanding the basics of UG, so I'll rate it 3 out of five.