This book is an attempt to answer the following questions: What are the essential features of language that permit a sentence or string of words to convey a complex idea? and What are the essential features of language users that enable them to produce and understand meaningful strings of words and to learn how to do so? The heart of these problems is syntax, and our answers constitute a new theory of syntax and syntax acquisition.

The goal of a theory of syntax

A theory of syntax must explain how someone can express a complex idea by organizing units of language into an appropriate pattern that conveys the idea, and how another person is able to identify from the language pattern, not only the concepts expressed by the individual units of language, but the relationships among the concepts that make up the idea. A theory of syntax should also explain what essential properties of language and of language users allow this method of encoding to be learned.

In trying to identify the essential features of a phenomenon, a good theory tries to represent the phenomenon as simply as possible without doing injustice to the complexity it is trying to explain. Actual syntax use (and its learning) may involve many redundant operations in order to increase speed and reliability. A theory of syntax will not be directly interested in all the properties and processes that may be involved in syntax use and acquisition, but in those that must be involved – the minimally essential features for syntax to work and to be learned.