Tutorial: an introduction to syntax

This paper is intended as an introduction to syntax. Borrowing from Chomsky's Government & Binding and Principles & Parameters frameworks (Chomsky, 1986, 1992, 1995), various aspects of syntactic theory are described. These include lexical, functional, and phrasal categories and how they are put together into clauses and sentences, how words are represented in the mental lexicon, how lexical properties project to the syntax, and how noun phrases are assigned structural and semantic information. Additionally, how sentences that are not canonically ordered are derived and represented, how and to what do pronouns refer, and the principles that connect all these theoretical notions to form knowledge of language are described. The paper concludes with a summary of work in normal and disordered language, including treatment of language disorders, that has exploited aspects of the syntactic theory described in this paper.