The Cambridge handbook of historical syntax Syntax is an indispensable part of the study of grammaticalization but initially it was backgrounded in comparison to the above mentioned fields. This has something to do with the intellectual environment in which modern grammaticalization studies emerged. The study of grammaticalization was part of a movement that revolted against the overwhelming dominance of generative linguistics in theoretical linguistics of the 1960s and early 1970s which seemingly tried to reduce the study of language to the statement of syntactic (and perhaps phonological) rules. Generative syntax was perceived as the extreme off shoot of structuralism and scholars were looking for paradigms countering or offering an alternative to structuralism and structuralist analysis