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cover

Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction

More praise and comments…

Syntactic Theoryis, without a doubt, the best available introduction to unification-based syntactic theory. Ivan Sag and Tom Wasow have done a superb job of elucidating the strengths of this approach in a reader-friendly way, without sacrificing formal rigor or depth of explanation.” –Gregory Stump, University of Kentucky

“My undergraduate students loved this book. They immediately saw the value of modelling a domain to formalize hypotheses within it, and jumped right into questioning the details, as any good syntactician should.” –Georgia Green, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

This is a textbook that makes it truly fun to teach introductory syntax. It is thoroghly data-driven and teaches the student to pay attention to empirical details and to find linguistic patterns and explanations for them. Based on my own teaching experience with the book, I have found that the book “works” in the sense that by the end of the semester the student has been empowered to extend the book's analyses through precise grammars of their own that can capture syntactic, morphological, and semantic patterns and correlations. I know of no other book on the market today that achieves this. In my view, Sag and Wasow have set a new standard for introductory syntax volumes with their book that all future books should be measured against.–Gert Webelhuth, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

With Ivan Sag and Tom Wasow's new textbook, it is possible to give first and second year undergraduate students of computational linguistics a working understanding of the leading ideas in HPSG without first having to cover a lot of historical development in generative grammar. –Elisabet Engdahl, Gothenburg University, Sweden

“I found Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introductionto be very clear and easy to understand, as did my students.

The inclusion of many recent developments within HPSG, which have not appeared elsewhere (at least in easily accessible form), make the book truly state-of-the-art. It builds this state-of-the-art grammar from basic grammars, such as Finite-State Automata, as well as others, making it ideal for non-linguists, and in particular computer scientists.” –Jean-Pierre Koenig, SUNY at Buffalo

“As an introductory textbook should be, this book is elegant and parsimonious, in particular, with SPR functioning dually as 'specifier' and 'subject', and GAP replacing SLASH with no LOCAL-NONLOCAL distinction. I've come to appreciate Syntactic Theorymuch more than previous works on HPSG. The book is well meant to be realistic and performance-plausible while espousing the competence model of phrase structure grammar.” –Suk-Jin Chang, Seoul National University

“Of the various books I have used for teaching syntax, this is the one that I prefer most. It is introductory in the sense that it requires little in terms of background or previous knowledge, but it is also advanced in the sense that it gradually builds up to a level of sophistication that is rarely achieved in introductory textbooks. The exercises are well integrated and challenging enough to trigger lively discussion and a high level of active participation from the students.” –Frank Van Eynde, University of Leuven


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