Advanced English Syntax

This work, together with the previously published Basic English Syntax (2019), contains a discussion of the core syntactic phenomena which characterize the English language and proposes a principled explanation for them. In particular, this volume tackles rather complex syntactic constructions, such as infinitival clauses, relative clauses or clauses with a marked word order. Furthermore, the theory outlined will be applied to some specific areas, like cohesion and telegraphic language, which are generally tackled by other related disciplines. We will argue that a formal syntactic approach can help to solve some of the puzzles typically related to these fields of analysis. We will adopt the theoretical approach known as Generative Grammar (since Chomsky 1957). The basic idea is that a Universal Grammar is innate in our brain, a fact which renders all languages similar despite appearances. Therefore, English will often be contrasted with other languages, in order to show how phenomena that look different may be given a common explanation, based on a diverse parametric choice