Review Article: Remarks on Introductory Syntax

Four introductions to generative syntax are reviewed: Peter Culicover's Principles and Parameters: An Introduction to Syntactic Theory (Oxford: Oxford U Press, 1997); James D. McCawley's The Syntactic Phenomena of English (second edition, Chicago: U Chicago Press, 1998); Andrew Radford's Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English: A Minimalist Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 1997); & Ian Roberts's Comparative Syntax (London: Arnold, 1997). The need for formal rigor & clarity in the presentation of fundamental concepts of syntactic analysis is stressed in light of the difficulty of choosing the version of generative grammar to be presented in an introductory textbook. Whereas McCawley's approach to generative theory remains largely in the 1970s (his references to Noam Chomsky end at Barriers) & Radford's text expounds the minimalist program of the mid-1990s while ignoring its predecessors, both Culicover & Roberts present the principles & parameters approach to syntax in its preminimalist stage & treat minimalism briefly. The four texts are disjoint in their topic selections & have other weaknesses, including serious terminological confusion, which reduce their effectiveness as textbooks. 49 References. J. Hitchcock