An advanced-level introductory textbook taking a critical, practical approach to the analysis of syntactic structures.

Robert D. Levine is Professor of Linguistics at Ohio State University. He is the co-author of The Unity of Unbounded Dependency Constructions (with Thomas E. Hukari, 2015), and the editor of Formal Grammar (1992) and Studies in Contemporary Phrase Structure Grammar (with Georgia M. Green, Cambridge, 2010). He has also published many articles in journals such as Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Language, Linguistic Inquiry, Linguistics and Philosophy and the Journal of Linguistics.

1. Syntactic data, patterns and structure; 2. Syntactic rules and lexical valence; 3. The auxiliary dependency; 4. Local dependencies and lexical rules; 5. Infinitival complements; 6. The limits of valence: topicalization.