i never thought i'd say this about a syntax book (hehe!) but this work promotes freedom of thought and is a great read. i understand that the seeming lack of rules might confuse or frustrate a formally grounded linguist, in the same way that my current laziness in not hitting shift to capitalize is probably driving some wingnut out there mad, but the book is perfect if you don't have a need to sweepingly generalize everything (Croft intentionally is anti- universalist within this book because it's designed for typologists, who have had to deal with reductionism for a long time and are probably really happy that someone is finally validating the holes they found in universal generalizations while they were analyzing languages other than english ). my grad colleagues and i love it, so ha.