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Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics
Introduction to Government & Binding Theory
Since its first publication in 1991 Liliane Haegeman's Introduction to Government and Binding Theory has become established as the most authoritative introduction to the Principles and Parameters approach to syntactic theory. This new edition has been extensively updated throughout. Major structural changes include new chapters on Functional Heads and Head Movement and on Relativized Minimality. Discussions of a number of topics missing from or not paid due attention in the first edition have been integrated or expanded, for the structure of small clauses (in chaprer 2), chain formation (in chapter 6), and reconstruction, multiple movement, wh -absorption, Full Interpretation, and expletive replacement (in chapter 9). The copious exercises have been revised to increase potential for creativty and flexibility of approach. New exericases highlight further controversial issues.
In short, this book offers a complete, updated introduction to the current state of Government and Binding Theory, suitable for readers with some basic knowledge of generative linguistics.
In short, this book offers a complete, updated introduction to the current state of Government and Binding Theory, suitable for readers with some basic knowledge of generative linguistics.
736 pages, Perfect Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 28, 2022
I deeply & truly hated every single wasted second of the past nine months on reading this stupid stupid stupid obsolete book! Why couldn’t we just jump into minimalism approach?! Not to mention that I have to review some chapters for the stupid exam in a few weeks! Unworthy! Unforgivable! Gosh I’m so angry!
💩 💩 💩
از صفحه به صفحهی کتابت و هرکسی که به کتاب عتیقهت وفاداره و شدیدا و قویا توصیهش میکنه عمیقا متنفرم، خانوم هگمن!
(کتاب احمقانهش روی فید بالا اومد و نفرتم تجدید شد!)
💩 💩 💩
از صفحه به صفحهی کتابت و هرکسی که به کتاب عتیقهت وفاداره و شدیدا و قویا توصیهش میکنه عمیقا متنفرم، خانوم هگمن!
(کتاب احمقانهش روی فید بالا اومد و نفرتم تجدید شد!)
January 19, 2020
I can't take it any longer! It was the second time I tried to read this beast of a syntax and, yet, on page 250 I thought that's it! I can't take it anymore. THIS BOOK IS UTTERLY BORING.
No matter how I adore linguistics, this book is not mine!
No matter how I adore linguistics, this book is not mine!
January 7, 2020
Generative linguistics
February 5, 2011
Very useful, very VERY well explained. It requires to be read carefully, though, if you want to understand some of the more complex concepts in the latter chapters. Not apt for a quick rush-before-your-linguistics-exam! This will only make you understand those-things-in-the-sentences and make you wiser.
Not very important, but there is a typo in page 42. *grammer. A typo on the word GRAMMAR. It just blows my mind! I marked it with a REALLY RED pen. It felt good, to be able to find a fault on the book. She probably added the typo to make people like me feel better about ourselves. This book is that good.
Not very important, but there is a typo in page 42. *grammer. A typo on the word GRAMMAR. It just blows my mind! I marked it with a REALLY RED pen. It felt good, to be able to find a fault on the book. She probably added the typo to make people like me feel better about ourselves. This book is that good.
July 12, 2018
Finished -- exactly after a year (minus six days)! A good intro book, but sometimes (especially towards the end), there was a bit too much of technicalities that I didn't enjoy all that much. Plus it's now a bit outdated, though it's still very good for diving into the general logic behind the generative grammar research and some data patterns.
February 3, 2009
It's not fun and it's not pretty, but this is a coherent and generally well done account of government and binding theory for those who already have some background. The pace is fairly crisp. Carnie's book makes a better introduction.
May 30, 2021
Like virtually all syntax textbooks written in the past 50 years or so, this one by Liliane Haegeman (hereafter H) begins with a discussion of Chomsky’s poverty of the stimulus argument, the notion that universal syntactic principles must be available to the child learning to speak. These universal principles, together with certain still rather mysterious language-specific parameters which license variation in or divergence from language’s otherwise inviolable formal template, equip the young learner with all the tools necessary for him or her to generate all of the grammatical sentences of a particular language, and only the grammatical sentences. H’s Introduction to Government and Binding Theory incorporates a voluminous syntactic literature in order to furnish the technical tools and metalinguistic vocabulary necessary for anyone to analyze syntax in a way that mirrors how children learn (activate?) their abstract and baroque rule systems. For Chomsky, the child applies universal principles and sets language-specific parameters en route to the achievement of a fully productive yet almost entirely subconscious knowledge of his or her grammar.
After this introduction, H’s book takes the reader through nearly 700 pages of formal syntactic representations and derivations of constructions, and not much else. The book proceeds from a mature Government and Binding theory up to the early days of the Minimalist Program. Even with a work of this length, H had to make significant choices over what to include and what to exclude from the mainstream generative canon. There are no alternative discussions of monostratal or non-derivational architectures of the human language faculty. Indeed, one of the criticisms I have against this book is that H abides a little too closely to the orthodoxy of Saint Noam. But Chomsky is still king of syntax for a reason. His well-reasoned arguments along with those of many of his followers are very often insightful, if not revelatory. Still, H’s presentation of the historical development and progressive evolution of the field of mainstream syntax implies that the schematic career of generative grammar and the publication history of Saint Noam are virtually isomorphic. Be that as it may, H generally makes wise and tasteful decisions about what to include in her book and what to pass over in silence.
But whatever your training in linguistics, you the reader will come away from this book with a renewed conviction that syntactic derivations entailing locality of government, cyclical transformations, and rigid constraints on representations at all levels have as their basis a kernel of psychological reality. The derivations of sentences presented by H are generally very satisfying as formal explanations of syntactic facts. And it helps that H provides a generous assortment of trees to go along with the less readable but far more numerous bracket notations.
The rationalist backbone of syntactic theory supports a logical system whereby the forms which linguistic data may take are constrained by meta-theoretical rules (binary branching, specifier-head agreement, strict locality, governed traces, etc.). Such meta-rules unfortunately tend to dictate whether a syntactic rule or representation is more natural or universal than another. In syntax, the theory regrettably derives the data at least as much as the data feeds back into the theory. In effect, the assumptions of Universal Grammar constitute a sort of bias about what is and is not a possible construction or grammar. What I am calling bias can go both ways. Some aspects of English syntax are now understood differently in light of research based on often radically ‘other’ languages. For example the split INFL hypothesis requires that agreement and tense be separate heads even though they are typically fused in English into a single head. I believe it is well worth our while to have our impressions of English colored by other languages, especially when the other languages are unambiguously distinct from English. Other languages can be inflectional or non-configurational, for example. In other cases, however, languages are seemingly forced to conform to universals that look a hell of a lot like English. For example, there are Chinese linguists who maintain that Chinese is exactly like English in moving question words to the beginning of the clause, except that in Chinese you don’t hear it. This ‘covert’ movement occurs (after the string has been sent to the phonology) in a quasi-mythical semantic interface called logical form. Another example of UG bias is deriving all basic word orders (somewhat spuriously) from a universally underlying subject-verb-object ordering.
I have a further criticism of this book which boils down to its overly modular approach to syntax. In the best of all possible worlds, H would have gone into the morpho-phonological and semantic-pragmatic aspects of using sentences in natural language. Instead, we are left with the onerous burden of explaining syntactic facts only in terms of other syntactic facts. While this promotes the academic autonomy of the field of linguistics, it amounts to bad science. Without anthropology, cognitive science, history, comparative/historical philology, sociology, and analytical semantics and pragmatics, linguistics would never have gotten off the ground. And I feel that the field of syntax now casts a much broader net than it did in 1994 when the second edition of Introduction to Government and Binding Theory was published. The final chapter of H’s book is on relativized minimality. Relativised minimality, which formalizes divergent patterns of local government within and between languages, has opened the door to other kinds of linguistic relativism. Maybe not Sapir-Whorf relativism, but linguists are certainly venturing further afield a la Boas. The idea that different languages are genuinely distinct is no longer considered the absurdity that it once was. And the left periphery (beginning of the sentence) these days hosts an array of positions for topicalized or focused elements projected from the functional categories in a particular language’s lexicon.
When writing over 25 years ago, H found it acceptable to look almost entirely at English, with some brief encounters with other, mostly European, languages. And even when looking just at English, H’s grammaticality judgments often did not match my own, especially with subjacency violations. I also have strong reservations against accepting the ontology of empty categories without qualification. H insists that empty categories are not really empty but are feature bundles copied and transmitted in local steps up the tree. But if you can’t hear the empty category... (examples are like PRO in ‘I tried PRO to leave’ where the subject of the infinitive is in an ungoverned and so silent position that receives its reference from the matrix subject ‘I’ which commands it; or take ‘Who(m) did you see t?’ where the person-object variable ‘whom’ is moved to the specifier of the +WH complementizer node that in turn holds the tense morpheme ‘did’; or take the passive ‘the ball was kicked’ which comes from ‘e was kicked the ball’, where ‘ball’ is theta-marked by the verb as theme before it moves to ‘e’ to receive structural case and fulfill the requirement that English sentences have surface subjects)... and if you can’t hear traces inherited from deep structure, and if you can’t hear logical form reconstruction with its silent, covert movement, then aren’t deep structure and logical form really like global and parallel representations of the lowly surface structure?
But I can’t blame a book for being a quarter century in theoretical arrears. As I noted, H’s book forms a thorough and still necessary framework for linguists who wish to get their feet wet whilst learning to demystify the arcane practice of syntactic analysis. I’ve read maybe half a dozen GB/PP/Minimalist textbooks, but for clarity of exposition, breadth of coverage, and succinctness of explanation, I would recommend this work over many others. H gives a clear sense of the wherefores and whys of syntax. And best of all, H’s writing lends an excitement and enthusiasm to what can be some often rather dry lines of inquiry. I see H’s textbook as occupying a crucial niche in time between the golden age of English-centric syntax and our current age with its massively increased appreciation of grammatical diversity, manifested by an openness to ‘new’ functional projections and ‘novel’ constructions. These projections, both from the lexicon and from the theory, demonstrate how different languages, while still being economical and constrained in their own ways, are nevertheless part of a much larger syntactic world that we are only just now beginning to explore.
I downloaded H’s book from the internet. There were a few pages missing, but otherwise the text was in good shape, no underlining or marginalia. Another freebie out there is Minimalist Syntax Revisited on Radford’s site. For a more modern and more expensive look at minimalism, see Carnie’s syntax textbook and workbook, which go into more recent topics like v shells and verb initial languages. For primary sources, I would check out Chomsky (especially Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) and Remarks on Nominalization (1970)). I am currently working through the phenomenal Annotated Syntax Reader, 35 articles introduced and edited down by Kayne et al. H’s book might be regarded as a pre- or co-requisite for the annotated reader.
After this introduction, H’s book takes the reader through nearly 700 pages of formal syntactic representations and derivations of constructions, and not much else. The book proceeds from a mature Government and Binding theory up to the early days of the Minimalist Program. Even with a work of this length, H had to make significant choices over what to include and what to exclude from the mainstream generative canon. There are no alternative discussions of monostratal or non-derivational architectures of the human language faculty. Indeed, one of the criticisms I have against this book is that H abides a little too closely to the orthodoxy of Saint Noam. But Chomsky is still king of syntax for a reason. His well-reasoned arguments along with those of many of his followers are very often insightful, if not revelatory. Still, H’s presentation of the historical development and progressive evolution of the field of mainstream syntax implies that the schematic career of generative grammar and the publication history of Saint Noam are virtually isomorphic. Be that as it may, H generally makes wise and tasteful decisions about what to include in her book and what to pass over in silence.
But whatever your training in linguistics, you the reader will come away from this book with a renewed conviction that syntactic derivations entailing locality of government, cyclical transformations, and rigid constraints on representations at all levels have as their basis a kernel of psychological reality. The derivations of sentences presented by H are generally very satisfying as formal explanations of syntactic facts. And it helps that H provides a generous assortment of trees to go along with the less readable but far more numerous bracket notations.
The rationalist backbone of syntactic theory supports a logical system whereby the forms which linguistic data may take are constrained by meta-theoretical rules (binary branching, specifier-head agreement, strict locality, governed traces, etc.). Such meta-rules unfortunately tend to dictate whether a syntactic rule or representation is more natural or universal than another. In syntax, the theory regrettably derives the data at least as much as the data feeds back into the theory. In effect, the assumptions of Universal Grammar constitute a sort of bias about what is and is not a possible construction or grammar. What I am calling bias can go both ways. Some aspects of English syntax are now understood differently in light of research based on often radically ‘other’ languages. For example the split INFL hypothesis requires that agreement and tense be separate heads even though they are typically fused in English into a single head. I believe it is well worth our while to have our impressions of English colored by other languages, especially when the other languages are unambiguously distinct from English. Other languages can be inflectional or non-configurational, for example. In other cases, however, languages are seemingly forced to conform to universals that look a hell of a lot like English. For example, there are Chinese linguists who maintain that Chinese is exactly like English in moving question words to the beginning of the clause, except that in Chinese you don’t hear it. This ‘covert’ movement occurs (after the string has been sent to the phonology) in a quasi-mythical semantic interface called logical form. Another example of UG bias is deriving all basic word orders (somewhat spuriously) from a universally underlying subject-verb-object ordering.
I have a further criticism of this book which boils down to its overly modular approach to syntax. In the best of all possible worlds, H would have gone into the morpho-phonological and semantic-pragmatic aspects of using sentences in natural language. Instead, we are left with the onerous burden of explaining syntactic facts only in terms of other syntactic facts. While this promotes the academic autonomy of the field of linguistics, it amounts to bad science. Without anthropology, cognitive science, history, comparative/historical philology, sociology, and analytical semantics and pragmatics, linguistics would never have gotten off the ground. And I feel that the field of syntax now casts a much broader net than it did in 1994 when the second edition of Introduction to Government and Binding Theory was published. The final chapter of H’s book is on relativized minimality. Relativised minimality, which formalizes divergent patterns of local government within and between languages, has opened the door to other kinds of linguistic relativism. Maybe not Sapir-Whorf relativism, but linguists are certainly venturing further afield a la Boas. The idea that different languages are genuinely distinct is no longer considered the absurdity that it once was. And the left periphery (beginning of the sentence) these days hosts an array of positions for topicalized or focused elements projected from the functional categories in a particular language’s lexicon.
When writing over 25 years ago, H found it acceptable to look almost entirely at English, with some brief encounters with other, mostly European, languages. And even when looking just at English, H’s grammaticality judgments often did not match my own, especially with subjacency violations. I also have strong reservations against accepting the ontology of empty categories without qualification. H insists that empty categories are not really empty but are feature bundles copied and transmitted in local steps up the tree. But if you can’t hear the empty category... (examples are like PRO in ‘I tried PRO to leave’ where the subject of the infinitive is in an ungoverned and so silent position that receives its reference from the matrix subject ‘I’ which commands it; or take ‘Who(m) did you see t?’ where the person-object variable ‘whom’ is moved to the specifier of the +WH complementizer node that in turn holds the tense morpheme ‘did’; or take the passive ‘the ball was kicked’ which comes from ‘e was kicked the ball’, where ‘ball’ is theta-marked by the verb as theme before it moves to ‘e’ to receive structural case and fulfill the requirement that English sentences have surface subjects)... and if you can’t hear traces inherited from deep structure, and if you can’t hear logical form reconstruction with its silent, covert movement, then aren’t deep structure and logical form really like global and parallel representations of the lowly surface structure?
But I can’t blame a book for being a quarter century in theoretical arrears. As I noted, H’s book forms a thorough and still necessary framework for linguists who wish to get their feet wet whilst learning to demystify the arcane practice of syntactic analysis. I’ve read maybe half a dozen GB/PP/Minimalist textbooks, but for clarity of exposition, breadth of coverage, and succinctness of explanation, I would recommend this work over many others. H gives a clear sense of the wherefores and whys of syntax. And best of all, H’s writing lends an excitement and enthusiasm to what can be some often rather dry lines of inquiry. I see H’s textbook as occupying a crucial niche in time between the golden age of English-centric syntax and our current age with its massively increased appreciation of grammatical diversity, manifested by an openness to ‘new’ functional projections and ‘novel’ constructions. These projections, both from the lexicon and from the theory, demonstrate how different languages, while still being economical and constrained in their own ways, are nevertheless part of a much larger syntactic world that we are only just now beginning to explore.
I downloaded H’s book from the internet. There were a few pages missing, but otherwise the text was in good shape, no underlining or marginalia. Another freebie out there is Minimalist Syntax Revisited on Radford’s site. For a more modern and more expensive look at minimalism, see Carnie’s syntax textbook and workbook, which go into more recent topics like v shells and verb initial languages. For primary sources, I would check out Chomsky (especially Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) and Remarks on Nominalization (1970)). I am currently working through the phenomenal Annotated Syntax Reader, 35 articles introduced and edited down by Kayne et al. H’s book might be regarded as a pre- or co-requisite for the annotated reader.
December 7, 2023
A thorough intro to Government and Binding. Even though it may seem a bit dated in the context of the principles and parameters theory, it still helps develop a solid foundation for a further engagement with generative syntax. The only wrinkle in this position is the data illustrating the analysis, some of which features debatable grammatical judgments.
January 20, 2023
Oh god, this is definitely not an introduction to GAB theory, I find it challenging to understand, and have to look up basically everything before understanding a small paragraph
September 2, 2016
The first thing to say about this book is that I may need to re-read it or rather to study it. I wouldn't say I skimmed it, but I didn't read it thoroughly or closely. So I wouldn't and couldn't say that I understood it all. But at least, I can do better in research/ books with the same theoretical assumptions, and if I needed clarification I know where to go.
Andrew Carnie's book is much easier than this. It is not that much of theoreticality. It just introduces the theory in a full complete form. Yet this book is the best and
This book is theoretical. It presents the theory (The Government and Binding [GB] Theory) and presents arguments in favor of its formulation in this way. It gives details of its specific points and trys to justify them through Language. So they are valid as long as they are consistent with Language ( = all languages). So, this is an introduction to GB inasmuch as it gives tools and pre-knowledge necessary to go through the more advanced books of the theory (e.g. Chomsky's and those suggested in footnotes). As the author says:
Here's a question: "Does the book need an instructor?" Well, that would be better, but a diligent student with 'some' background and a little more reading in the theory would make his way through it.
Andrew Carnie's book is much easier than this. It is not that much of theoreticality. It just introduces the theory in a full complete form. Yet this book is the best and
"the most authoritative introduction to the Principles and Parameters approach to syntactic theory".In chapter two the author presents certain assumptions upon which she builds up and develops (or explains the construction and development of) the theory. Well, for me, that has been weak, for why would these assumptions entail this very theory. And what is the evidence of language that justifies this. Of course, other books would present this, but to build the whole book on an assumption without justifying it or even referring to books presenting justifications seemed harsh for me; I am going to learn a theory and study all this book because of a claim. Andrew Radford (1981) or his Transformational Grammar: A First Course (1988) has given better logical graduation of the theory than this.
This book is theoretical. It presents the theory (The Government and Binding [GB] Theory) and presents arguments in favor of its formulation in this way. It gives details of its specific points and trys to justify them through Language. So they are valid as long as they are consistent with Language ( = all languages). So, this is an introduction to GB inasmuch as it gives tools and pre-knowledge necessary to go through the more advanced books of the theory (e.g. Chomsky's and those suggested in footnotes). As the author says:
"In this book we develop an approach to generative syntax which is referrred to as the Principles and Parameters framework; within that approach we elaborate the core concepts of what is usually referred to as Government and Binding Theory. Still within the Principles and Parameters framework, Chomsky (1992) has been developing a different approach referred to as the Minimalist Program ... which is still being elaborated."
About this theory Rouveret (2011) says:"the basic tenets of the Government and Binding framework, where Universal Grammar is conceived of as a system of universal principles and a set of primitive parameters that, via the assignment of a value to each parameter, allow the derivation of language-specific grammars."However, its being introductory didn't mean that I could go through it like reading a general book in syntax or a story (the author doesn't have this knack, Andrew Carnie does). The book requires hard effort and extensive reading. A reader cannot move from one chapter to the following without full grasp of the details of the first.
Here's a question: "Does the book need an instructor?" Well, that would be better, but a diligent student with 'some' background and a little more reading in the theory would make his way through it.
June 18, 2008
If you agree with Government & Binding, you'll probably enjoy this book and find it to be a good resource. If, like other sane people, you don't agree with Government & Binding, you'll probably want to rip your eyes out if you read this.
May 1, 2007
Government and binding, though both fascinating in their own right, received a heavy handed treatment in this lengthy tome.
January 7, 2008
I am truly a geek, but I keep and savor all of my old text books. This one may have been a favorite because I loved the class, and less on its own merit, though.
November 1, 2010
Read better, read worse. Get a good instructor
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews