Description: This book is designed to teach undergraduate and beginning graduate students about the varieties of syntactic phenomena in different languages and a method of analyzing and describing them. The method is based on the concept of the syntactic construction, which is shared by various views of language structure. In this particular presentation, a construction is characterized as a combination of obligatory and optional functions, and each of these functions is related to a class of manifestations. Syntax as a whole is then seen as interrelating constructions on the ranks (size-levels) of the phrase, clause, and sentence.
Brief description: David G. Lockwood is Professor of Linguistics at Michigan State University, USA. He is co-editor, with Michael Cummings, Peter H. Fries and William Spruiell, of Relations and Functions within and around Language (Continuum, 2001).