I've studied syntax out of Kroeger's Analyzing Grammar, so I'm familiar with the basic ideas of generative syntax, like trees, constituent structure, and syntactic categories. I later read a paper that analyzed Spanish datives using Lexical Functional Grammar, so I bought Falk's Lexical Functional Grammar to understand LFG, but found there was a gap between the knowledge of syntax that Falk assumes and what I had. I'm looking for a work that summarizes the modern theory of syntax so I can fill in that gap—something between Kroeger and Falk.
None of the material I've found on Wikipedia or other obvious online sources has been good enough for my purposes; not only does Wikipedia not delve deep enough, it also often seems to assume the reader is familiar with the entire Chomsky oeuvre and explains one difficult concept in terms of another one, which is, in its own article, explained in terms of the first one. Wikipedia lacks depth, lacks examples, and lacks exercises; the first two, at least, are things I can't do without.
I'm not looking for "X-bar theory for dummies"; I'm looking for a survey of modern syntax, including X-bar theory, aimed at upper-division undergraduates or first-year graduate students of linguistics. Falk says in his preface that "it is assumed the reader is familiar with [...] contemporary derivational syntactic theory (Government/Binding theory and/or the Minimalist Program)"; I'm not familiar with contemporary derivational syntactic theory, so I'm looking for a work by an expert which summarizes the theory in a readable, but technically precise, way, something like what a linguistics professor might assign to third- or fourth-year undergraduates for an advanced theory of syntax class.
