Andrew Radford's new textbook is principally for students with little or no background in syntax who need a lively and up-to-date introduction to contemporary work on transformational grammar. It covers four main topics -the goals of linguistic theory, syntactic structure, the nature and role of the lexicon, and the function of transformations and the principles governing their application. The framework takes into account the major works such as Chomsky's knowledge of language and barriers written since the publication of Radford's widely acclaimed Transformational Syntax in 1981.