THIS study will touch on a variety of topics in syntactic

theory and English syntax, a few in some detail, several quite

superficially, and none exhaustively. It will be concerned with

the syntactic component of a generative grammar, that is, with

the rules that specify the well-formed strings of minimal syntactically

functioning units (Jormat ives) and assign structural

information of various kinds both to these strings and to strings

that deviate from well-formedness in certain respects.

The general framework within which this investigation will

proceed has been presented in many places, and some familiarity

with the theoretical and descriptive studies listed in the bibliography

is presupposed. In this chapter, I shall survey briefly some

of the main background assumptions, making no serious attempt

here to justify them but only to sketch them clearly.