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Rodney Huddleston, An introduction to English transformational syntax . (English language series, 10.) London: Longman, 1976. Pp. xiii + 273.

Huddleston has written an accurate, concise and clear introduction to transformational syntax, which leaves little for a reviewer to do except state the contents of the book and praise it. Most of English transformational syntax presents and argues for an orthodox Chomskyan position. Except for Chapter 14, 'A reconsideration of auxiliary verbs', which presents Huddleston's own analysis on the topic, there is little new in the book for the active linguist who has kept up with the field. But of course the book is not intended for such an audience. Chapter 1, 'Aims and scope of transformational-generative grammar', presents the basic concepts on which T-G grammar is built: the competence-performance distinction, well-formed sentences, generative grammars, syntactic structure, ambiguity and external and internal adequacy. Huddleston's examples are well-chosen and tend to be very convincing. 'Syntax in relation to semantics and phonology' argues for the autonomy of syntax, showing that syntactic units (categories and functions) are not definable in terms of semantic or phonological terms. Huddleston presents a clear exposition of the distributional determination of parts of speech, a topic that is generally neglected in most comparable books. Chapter 3 introduces the reader to Phrase Structure rules, derivations, trees and associated concepts and terminology, while the next chapter shows why transformations are needed, using as evidence the relationship between actives and passives, the distribution of reflexives and constructions which show evidence of subject raising. One of Huddleston's innovations in the Phrase Structure rules is a Verb-Group Constituent, which consists of auxiliaries and main verbs (70):