Thinking A Guide to Argumentation and Analysis is a textbook designed to teach introductory students the skills of relating data to theory and theory to data.
It is an important book for those people who are keen to lock-in the static semantics through studying the syntactical structures. The book focuses on the emergence of numerous syntactic theories and provides a unique perspective on analyzing those theories. Reading it was a pleasurable experience and I would highly recommend this book to other people.
the main concern of this book is to think in the same way linguists do when they observe a phenomenon in a language and try to explain the attested data in order to understand the functions of the language . it starts with given evidence to emphasis that idea that linguistics is a science , then it deals with the phenomenon of syntactic ambiguity , SAI inversion ect .
it was suffering when I was reading it because I had to... but when I actually started processing all of it and putting it together it's actually a really simple, step-by-step guide to the whole theory. this is not my field of choice, but if you are interested in syntax - this is a good book to start.