Peter Sells

Lectures on Contemporary Syntactic Theories presents an side-by-side outline of three major syntactic frameworks. Following an initial chapter on syntactic phenomena common to them all, there is a chapter each on Government and Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, and Lexical Functional Grammar. This is a great idea for a book, but unfortunately it is rather dated now that Government and Binding has been superseded by the Minimalist Program and GPSG has evolved into HPSG. A final show more postscript which speculates on the tradeoffs the different frameworks make is written at a high enough level of generality to still be relevant, but overall this book is of mostly historical interest at this point. It would be interesting to see an updated edition. show less