1.1 Language, Grammar and Linguistic Theory

The uninitiated student might be surprised to find that there are many ways to describe language, not all compatible with each other. In this book we make use of a particular system of grammatical description based mainly on Government and Binding theory, though it is not our aim to teach this theory and we will very rarely refer to it directly. We use the theory to offer a description of English, rather than using English to demonstrate the theory. We will spend a short amount of time at the beginning of the book to state our reasons for choosing this theory, as opposed to any other, to base our descriptions.