And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me, and be my love. The Shepherds’ Swains shall dance and sing For thy delight each May-morning: If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me, and be my love.

And I will make thee beds of Roses And a thousand fragrant posies, A cap of flowers, and a kirtle Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle; A gown made of the finest wool Which from our pretty Lambs we pull; Fair lined slippers for the cold, With buckles of the purest gold; A belt of straw and Ivy buds,

One reason may be the emotional investment we all have in language. Language is more than a neutral medium for transmitting a message. It has washed over us like a river continually since birth. We use it constantly. It shapes who we are. Think back to your earliest memories. Can you ever remember a time when you were without language? Identity and language twine about each other so tightly that they are impossible to separate. Children of immigrant families, for example, often associate the language of their home with warmth and strong personal connections, with the deepest, private sense of who they are, in contrast to the formal public language of school and the outside world.

This textbook attempts to introduce just as much theory as is necessary for a solid basic model of English grammar–one which helps a student conduct a reasonably accurate constituent analysis of authentic, unsimplified, written English without delving into so much detail that the analysis becomes overwhelming. The textbook minimizes topics or approaches that are specific to particular linguistic schools such as minimalism or construction grammar, and we’ve tried to minimize the number of theory-internal reasons for adopting a particular analysis.