The principal aim of this book is to introduce to the reader the foundations of generative syntax, its first four chapters describe the basic syntactic facts (word classes, phrases, sentences) in a way which is "naive", i.e. very weakly theory bound. Therefore they can be useful to anyone interested in syntax, whatever his or her theoretical model may be. The following chapters present the so called "principles and parameters theory" of Chomsky and his followers. Many of the "naive" facts examined in the preceding chapters are restated in this theoretical framework: in this way, the reader can understand the usefulness of theory, which not only is able to describe phemomena, but also to explain them. Given the introductory way in which the book is written, it may also be useful to linguists working in other areas or people working in other fields that are related to language such as psychologists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists and so on.

Contents: I. Syntax: its topics and its aims. - II. Naive Syntax I: Parts of speech. - III. Naive Syntax II: Constituents. - IV. Naive Syntax III: Sentences. - V. Sintax and lexicon. - VI. Projections of lexical heads and their structure. - VII. The structure of the sentence. - VIII. Movement phenomena. - IX. The theory of government. - X. The theory of binding. - XI. Conclusions: some recent developments in syntactic theory.

Giorgio Graffi is a Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Pavia, Italy.

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