《英语生成语法》评介

Haegeman and Gueron: English Grammar: A Generative Perspective

本文对句法新作《英语生成语法》(English Grammar: A Generative Perspective. Liliane Haegemen and Jacqueline Gueron. (Blackwell textbooks in linguistics; 14).Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1999. Pp. xiii, 672.)进行了介绍和评述。主要分两个部分:(1) 全书主要内容介绍;(2) 对该书的评价。本文在第一部分里较为详尽地介绍了该书各章节的主要内容,第二部分则通过和其他几本句法教材的对比,评述该书的优缺点和得失。本文认为该书是一本内容全面详实,结构完整系统,论证条理清晰的句法教材,值得推荐。

As a new-comer to the family of the Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics, English Grammar: A Generative Perspective by Haegemen and Gueron (1999) is a comprehensive and systematic teaching material of syntactic theory, this paper aims to make a brief introduction to and a short review of this book.. Three parts constitute this paper: an introductory part, a concise introduction to the book, and a comment on it, the contents of which are as follows: In the introductory part, the author divides the six chapters of this book into three parts: the first part includes chapters 1 to 3, discussing the pure syntactic aspect of the English sentence; the second part, which is composed of chapters 4 and 5, deals with the interpretation of the structure; chapter 6 comprises the third part. The author also makes a distinction among the six chapters from the point of view of the Principles and Parameter Theory (PPT) in the generative tradition. In section 2, the author makes a short introduction to this book: Chapter 1 introduces the principles which determine what kind of components the sentence minimally contain, providing a first survey of the factors determining the structure of the English sentences. Following the discussion of the principles which determine the major constituents of the sentence in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 introduces the syntactic mechanism of movement. Chapter 3 is a return to the discussion of clause structure, showing that functional projections must be decomposed into discrete, hierarchically organized, elementary projections. Chapters 4 and 5 are concerned with the form and interpretation. Sentence interpretation is compositional. Movement operations do not alter the relation between a verb and its argument. In chapter 6, the focus is to account for both linguistic universals and linguistic variation. In addition to invariant general principles, there are dimensions, or parameters, along which languages can differ. The author points out in the concluding part that, this book is, on the one hand, well-written and carefully-organized, meriting a thorough study for beginners, while it still leaves some parts to be desired on the other.