English Grammar in the Framework of Generative Grammar

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The purpose of this research is to consturct an English grammar for high school students in the framework of generative grammar, based on the huge amount of facts and analyses that have been found in this framework since its advent. The generative ways of accounting for and analyzing facts are not only very interesting in themselves but also very useful in English education. However, it has been generally considered that generative accounts are so abstract that they cannot be appropriate for teaching English. This is contrary to fact: The findings in generative grammar are very helpful in English education in that the generative accounts of sentence constructions greatly help students get accurate and deep understanding of sentence constructions. However, almost nobody has ever attempted to make use of generative analyses of sentence construction.In this research I aimed to put to practical use the achievements of generative grammar to improve English education in Japan. In order to achieve this goal it is best to write a grammar book for high school students, and I have completed a grammar book entitled "An English Grammar based on Generative Grammar." In this book I have made many attempts to improve grammatical accounts of English in learning grammars: I have paid special attention to such problems as the finite/nonfinite distinction and the correlation between syntactic properties of verbs and their meanings. I have also proposed the generative account for relative clause constructions and comparative constructions. These proposals should provide students with much more clarified accounts of why relative clauses must have a gap in their own clauses and why comparative constructions have such and such properties.