How to Study

Read. Open the textbook on Zenodo and find the printed pages listed for your chapter.

Watch. Use the matching video lesson to review the ideas, examples, and structural analyses.

Listen. Revisit the chapter through its podcast, then return to the book for practice.

Work through the chapters in order or use the directory to revisit a topic. Try the chapter activities before checking the explained answers, and compare your reasoning with the source. Chapter and topic titles retain the textbook’s wording; the introductions and brief explanations provide separate study support.

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Explore the 15 Chapters

Choose a chapter, read its textbook pages, and use the matching video and podcast to review its five core topics.

Chapter 1: Syntax as the Study of Sentence Structure

Textbook pp. 15–27

A sentence has structure inside its sequence of words. This chapter introduces the evidence used to investigate that structure and to test a claim about how a language works.

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Five core topics

1.1 What Syntax Studies — Explore how words form phrases and clauses, and how syntax investigates the patterns that make those combinations possible.

1.2 Grammatical, Acceptable, Correct, or Meaningful? — Distinguish grammaticality, acceptability in context, prescriptive correctness, and meaningfulness when evaluating an example.

1.3 Evidence: Judgments, Minimal Pairs, and Ambiguity — Use speaker judgments, carefully controlled comparisons, and alternative readings as evidence while reporting variation honestly.

1.4 Order, Structure, and the Unlimited Sentence — Examine hierarchy and recursion to explain how phrases and clauses can contain further units of the same kind.

1.5 How a Syntactic Argument Works — State a hypothesis, derive a prediction, test it against language data, and revise or limit the claim when necessary.

Chapter 2: Word Classes: Lexical Categories and Their Tests

Textbook pp. 28–41

A word’s meaning does not always reveal its grammatical class. This chapter uses endings, positions, and surrounding words to identify categories in actual sentences.

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Five core topics

2.1 Category as Distribution, Not Meaning — Classify words through the forms they take and the positions they occupy, including cases where familiar meaning-based definitions fail.

2.2 Tests for Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, and Adverbs — Combine inflection, derivational clues, and sentence frames to identify nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.

2.3 Prepositions and Particles — Use distribution and particle placement to distinguish a prepositional phrase from a particle associated with a verb.

2.4 Multiple Membership and Conversion — Recognize that the same written form can have different categories and examine new category uses formed without an added ending.

2.5 Grammatical Features across Words and Languages — Identify features such as number, person, tense, case, and definiteness, and compare how languages express them.

Chapter 3: Function Words and the Verb Group

Textbook pp. 42–54

Small words help organize the relationships in a sentence. This chapter examines determiners, pronouns, auxiliaries, and the grammatical patterns within an English verb group.

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Five core topics

3.1 Lexical and Functional Categories — Compare words that name people, things, and events with words that help mark grammatical relationships and structure.

3.2 Determiners and Pronouns — Distinguish words in the determiner position from pronouns that can stand for a complete noun phrase.

3.3 The Verb Group: Order and Form — Identify the main verb and check the fixed order of modal, perfect, progressive, and passive auxiliaries and their required verb forms.

3.4 Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Outline — Separate tense forms, the time referred to, aspect, and meanings such as possibility or necessity.

3.5 The Operator, Do-Support, and Two Previews — Locate the first auxiliary and examine its role in negation, inversion, and tags, including cases that require do-support.

Chapter 4: Phrases: Heads, Complements, and Modifiers

Textbook pp. 55–67

Phrases can contain one word or many words, but each is organized around a head. This chapter explains how heads, selected dependents, and added modifiers form larger structures.

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Five core topics

4.1 The Phrase and Its Head — Find the word that gives a phrase its category and helps determine where the whole phrase can occur.

4.2 Five Phrase Types — Identify noun, verb, prepositional, adjective, and adverb phrases using the textbook’s introductory conventions.

4.3 Complements and Modifiers — Use selection, omission, position, and other evidence to distinguish a head’s complements from additional modifiers.

4.4 Phrases inside Phrases — Read labeled brackets to trace how one phrase contains another and how repeated patterns build larger expressions.

4.5 Head Direction across Languages — Compare the position of heads and complements across languages, including prepositions and postpositions.

Chapter 5: Constituency: Finding the Parts of a Sentence

Textbook pp. 68–79

Words that stand together do not always form a grammatical unit. This chapter develops several tests for finding constituents and explains how to interpret results that disagree.

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Five core topics

5.1 Constituents: Why Strings Are Not Enough — Distinguish any adjacent sequence of words from a unit that belongs together within the structure of a particular sentence.

5.2 Substitution: One Word in Place of Many — Replace a proposed phrase with a suitable pro-form and check that the result keeps the relevant structure and meaning.

5.3 Movement: Fronting and Clefting — Try fronting and clefting to investigate which words can move together, with a context that makes the construction natural.

5.4 Coordination, Ellipsis, and Fragment Answers — Use coordination, omission, and short answers as supporting tests while recognizing their individual limitations.

5.5 Using the Tests with Care — Compare several suitable tests, consider why a result may mislead, and explain the strength and limits of your conclusion.

Chapter 6: Tree Diagrams and Phrase Structure Rules

Textbook pp. 80–94

Tree diagrams make a proposed sentence structure visible. This chapter connects trees with brackets and rules, then uses those representations to predict and test grammatical relationships.

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Five core topics

6.1 Brackets and Trees: One Analysis, Two Pictures — Translate between labeled brackets and tree diagrams while keeping the same words, categories, and constituent groupings.

6.2 Phrase Structure Rules — Use rules to state the order of a node’s parts and interpret symbols for optional and repeatable material.

6.3 Structural Relations in a Tree — Identify parent, daughter, sister, dominance, and c-command relationships by following the structure of a tree.

6.4 What Trees Predict — Compare trees for different readings and test the constituency and interpretation each attachment predicts.

6.5 Building, Testing, and Revising a Tree — Build a tree in stages, check its labels and attachments against the rules, and revise it when the analysis fails.

Chapter 7: Grammatical Functions and Basic Clause Patterns

Textbook pp. 95–108

A noun phrase can be a subject in one sentence and an object in another. This chapter separates phrase categories from grammatical functions and introduces the basic patterns of English clauses.

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Five core topics

7.1 Form and Function — State both the category of a phrase and the job it performs in its clause, recognizing that these are separate questions.

7.2 Subjects and Their Tests — Combine agreement, inversion, tag questions, and pronoun forms to identify a subject, including a long or dummy subject.

7.3 Objects and Complements — Distinguish direct and indirect objects from subject and object complements using their behavior and relationships.

7.4 Adjuncts — Identify optional clause information through omission, movement, and repetition, while checking what the particular verb selects.

7.5 The Basic Clause Patterns — Classify clauses with the seven patterns taught in the book and distinguish a required adverbial from an optional adjunct.

Chapter 8: Verbs and Their Arguments: Valency and Semantic Roles

Textbook pp. 109–121

Verbs differ in the participants and structures they allow. This chapter examines valency, selection, and semantic roles, then shows how the same roles can appear in different grammatical functions.

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Five core topics

8.1 Predicates, Arguments, and Valency — Identify a predicate’s selected arguments and count its valency using the book’s conventions, including unexpressed participants.

8.2 Selection: What a Verb Demands — Record the categories and other restrictions a verb places on its complements, such as a selected preposition or clause type.

8.3 Arguments and Adjuncts — Combine selection, understood participants, position, and other tests, recognizing that an optional phrase can still be an argument.

8.4 Semantic Roles — Describe the part a participant plays in an event or state, such as agent, patient, experiencer, theme, or instrument.

8.5 From Roles to Functions — Compare alternations in argument expression and explain how grammatical functions can change while relevant roles remain.

Chapter 9: Inside the Noun Phrase

Textbook pp. 122–135

A long noun phrase is organized around a head and can contain several layers of description. This chapter examines determiner positions, modifiers, complements, possession, and ambiguous attachments.

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Five core topics

9.1 The Head, Number, and Countability — Find the head noun and use its number and count or noncount use to explain determiner choices and agreement.

9.2 The Determiner Slot — Distinguish pre-determiners, central determiners, and post-determiners, and examine the order and combinations they allow.

9.3 Pre-modifiers: Adjectives, Participles, and Nouns — Analyze adjective phrases, participles, and nouns before a head while keeping category evidence separate from position alone.

9.4 After the Head: Complements and Modifiers — Distinguish selected noun complements from post-modifiers using the noun’s meaning, selection, and distribution.

9.5 Possessives, Nesting, and Ambiguity — Analyze possession expressed by a complete noun phrase, nested structures, and attachments that support more than one reading.

Chapter 10: Sentence Types: Statements, Questions, Commands, Exclamations, and Negation

Textbook pp. 136–149

Statements, questions, commands, and exclamations use different grammatical patterns. This chapter compares those patterns and follows the position of the operator, question phrase, and negative marker.

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Five core topics

10.1 Declaratives, and What a Sentence Is Used For — Identify declarative form and distinguish a clause’s grammatical type from the speech act it performs in a particular situation.

10.2 Yes-No Questions: The Operator Changes Place — Form and analyze subject–auxiliary inversion, moving only the operator and using do-support where the construction requires it.

10.3 Wh-Questions: The Fronted Phrase and Its Gap — Locate a complete wh-phrase and its grammatical function, and distinguish subject questions from questions with an object or other gap.

10.4 Imperatives and Exclamatives — Compare imperative and exclamative forms, including an imperative’s understood subject and the order in a what- or how-exclamative.

10.5 Negation — Locate negation in relation to the operator and examine do-support, main-verb be, and the structure of a negative clause.

Chapter 11: Complex Sentences: Coordination and Subordination

Textbook pp. 150–163

A sentence can link clauses as equals or place one inside another. This chapter develops a method for locating clause boundaries and representing coordination, complements, and adverbial clauses.

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Five core topics

11.1 Clauses, Main and Subordinate — Use finite verb groups and structural relationships to identify main and subordinate clauses within a sentence.

11.2 Coordination at Every Level — Analyze coordination of words, phrases, and clauses, and consider omissions and cases that need more than a simple category test.

11.3 Complement Clauses: Objects and Subjects — Identify selected clauses and their complementizers, distinguishing their subject, object, or other complement function.

11.4 Adverbial Clauses and Subordinators — Recognize clauses that add time, reason, condition, concession, or purpose and distinguish them from selected complements.

11.5 Trees for Embedded Clauses — Build trees for nested clauses by locating boundaries and attaching each clause according to its structural role.

Chapter 12: Non-finite Clauses, Relative Clauses, and Long-Distance Dependencies

Textbook pp. 164–178

Some clauses leave a subject or another phrase unspoken in its usual position. This chapter examines how those relationships are recovered and why certain structures restrict long dependencies.

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Five core topics

12.1 Clauses without Tense — Distinguish finite clauses from infinitive, -ing, and past-participle clauses through the form of their verb groups.

12.2 The Understood Subject: Control and Raising — Compare control and raising using the main verb’s argument structure and evidence about the understood subject.

12.3 Relative Clauses — Identify the noun modified by a relative clause and trace its relation to a relative pronoun or gap.

12.4 Dependencies across Clause Boundaries — Locate a fronted phrase and its gap in different clauses, then count the structural boundaries crossed by their link.

12.5 Islands: Where the Link Stops — Examine introductory island patterns, compare controlled examples, and recognize that grammar, meaning, context, and processing can affect judgments.

Chapter 13: Passives and Information Packaging

Textbook pp. 179–193

Different sentence structures can present the same event from different starting points. This chapter compares passives and other constructions that help speakers connect familiar information with new material.

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Five core topics

13.1 The Passive: Form and Functions — Recognize the be-passive through its auxiliary and participle, identify its subject, and examine the optional by-phrase.

13.2 What the Passive Changes and What Stays the Same — Compare active and passive functions while tracking the semantic roles that remain associated with the participants.

13.3 Existential "There" and Extraposition — Analyze dummy there and it, postponed phrases or clauses, and the ways these constructions introduce or reorganize information.

13.4 Clefts, Pseudo-Clefts, Fronting, and Inversion after Negatives — Compare focused and fronted constructions, including negative-fronting inversion, and identify their structural parts.

13.5 Given and New: Why Speakers Choose These Forms — Use context to distinguish given and new information and examine end-focus and end-weight as tendencies in sentence organization.

Chapter 14: From Trees to Theory: X-bar Structure, Functional Projections, and Movement

Textbook pp. 194–206

A second way of drawing structure can reveal relationships hidden by a simpler tree. This chapter introduces X-bar structure, TP, CP, and movement, then compares what the two analyses explain.

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Five core topics

14.1 A Level between the Head and the Phrase — Use substitution evidence to motivate an intermediate X-bar level that groups a head with its complement separately from a modifier.

14.2 The Clause as TP inside CP — Analyze a clause with tense and complementizer heads, identifying the subject as a specifier and the VP as a complement.

14.3 Movement: One Structure, Two Positions — Distinguish a pronounced position from the position where an expression is interpreted, including movement of an operator from T to C.

14.4 Moving Phrases: Questions, Topics, Passives, and Raising — Trace phrase movement in questions, topics, passives, and raising, while keeping it separate from head movement.

14.5 Two Analyses of One Sentence — Compare the groupings and relationships shown by flat and X-bar trees, including the advantages and assumptions of each analysis.

Chapter 15: Syntax across Languages and Syntactic Argumentation

Textbook pp. 207–219

English provides only one set of syntactic patterns. This chapter compares languages through glossed examples and shows how competing explanations can be evaluated with clear, limited evidence.

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Five core topics

15.1 Six Orders, and What "Dominant" Means — Compare the six subject–object–verb orders and distinguish a dominant order from the only order a language allows.

15.2 Four Patterns That Vary — Compare head direction, case alignment, subject expression, and question-phrase position without assuming all languages pattern alike.

15.3 Reading a Small Set of Glossed Data — Align original forms with glosses, compare what changes across examples, and state a rule with its evidence and limits.

15.4 Three Approaches to One Set of Facts — Compare generative, functional and typological, and constraint-based or construction-based questions while recognizing differences within these broad families.

15.5 Building an Argument, and Knowing Its Limits — Choose examples that distinguish competing hypotheses, identify counterexamples, and avoid claiming more than the tested evidence supports.

About the textbook

Foundations of Syntax: For EFL University Students

Project Director: Prof. Munassir Alhamami · First Edition | Version 1

Alhamami, M. (2026). Foundations of syntax: For EFL university students (1st ed., Version 1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22863856

Read or download the free textbook on Zenodo

Except where otherwise stated, the original textbook content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Material credited to other sources remains subject to its stated terms.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and NotebookLM assisted in developing the textbook. The Project Director is responsible for the final editorial decisions and released version.

The videos and podcasts are AI-generated study companions created with NotebookLM. The podcast uploads use static textbook covers with the original audio unchanged. Consult the textbook for the complete teaching, practice, and explained answers.

Chapter and topic headings retain the textbook’s wording. The introductions and topic explanations on this page are supplementary study support.