There is a vast literature on all of the topics discussed in the past seven chapters, much of it demanding a deeper technical background than I'm assuming for people using this textbook. The following sources should, however, be largely accessible to readers who've worked their way through all of the preceding material. The bibliographies of these sources will then offer further routes to still more advanced material. Full bibliographic details on all of these suggested readings are included in the list of references at the end of this volume.

Chapter 1

The material covered in the first chapter, which is intended to assist the reader in developing a sense of the critical patterns in data from the point of view of syntacticians, is more or less standard in syntax textbooks; a particularly nice example is Robert Borsley's Syntactic Theory (1993). But probably the most comprehensive explanation of what syntacticians are really after, and how they structure their inquiries to lead to the kind of elegant, far-reaching generalizations that constitute the Holy Grail of linguistics, is to be found in Andrew Radford's Transformational Grammar: A First Course (1988).

Chapter 2

The primary technical tools in this chapter are the decomposition of category labels into highly structured complex symbols utilizing feature names and values supplied for those names, and statements of constraints, using the format of context-free phrase structure rules, on the form of possible two-generation trees in terms of feature identities which must be satisfied in order for a given tree to be legal.

The treatment of categories as complex symbols was first introduced into theoretical discourse very early in an important but generally neglected paper by Gilbert Harman (1963), which provoked a rather hostile response by Chomsky (1964), who subsequently reintroduced the use of features without reference to Harman's prior work, first at the level of lexical categories (1965) and subsequently at the phrasal level (Chomsky 1970: 207–208), where the resistance to such treatment is attributed to the American structuralists of the 1940s and 1950s – despite the fact that the decomposition of phrasal categories into a category type and level of phrasal complexity, which anticipated Chomsky's own use of complex symbols in his 1970 paper, was first proposed by just such an American structuralist, Zelig Harris, in work published in the 1940s and early 1950s.