Understanding Syntax

Assuming no prior grammatical knowledge, Understanding Syntax explains and illustrates the major concepts, categories and terminology involved in the study of cross-linguistic syntax. Taking a largely theory-neutral and descriptive viewpoint throughout, this book: * introduces syntactic typology, syntactic description and the major typological categories found in the languages of the world * clarifies with examples grammatical constructions and relationships between words in a clause, including word classes and their syntactic properties; grammatical relations such as subject and object; case and agreement processes; passives and other valency-changing processes; questions and relative clauses * features in-text and chapter-end exercises to extend the reader’s knowledge of syntactic concepts and argumentation, drawing on data from over 100 languages * highlights the principles involved in writing a brief syntactic sketch of languageThis sixth edition has been revised to include