For each article, we provide an introduction and discussion questions, with the hope of teaching today's students how to read past work. We are especially interested in bringing out the ways in which each article is simultaneously out-of-date and still essential. We do this by emphasizing those aspects that remain useful and valid, i.e. by highlighting its lasting contribution to the ever-growing (if sometimes underappreciated) solid core of the field of syntax. At the same time, we include references to subsequent work that has made additional progress in the area of syntax in question, so as to help students see the connection between past and current work.

The goal of our volume is to bring together excerpts from approximately forty articles that contain seminal ideas in the field of syntax, and show how these ideas have shaped the field and are still present in current thinking.