Explores licensing theory and its implications for a theory of syntax. This book brings a series of papers which focus on developing a constrained set of licensing mechanisms relating elements in a syntactic representation, and on the different properties of lexical and functional heads as licenses of complements and specifiers.

O. PRELIMINARY REMARKS Initial drafts of the papers in this collection were presented in a con ference entitled 'Views on Phrase Structure', held at the University of Florida, Gainesville, in March, 1989. Eleven of the twenty-three partici pants in the conference were able to contribute to this volume. The purpose of the conference was to explore theories of phrase structure in their relation to other subsystems of grammar and/or systems of nonlinguistic knowledge. Some of the grammatical subsystems which the authors consider are theta-theory, movement, Case, and binding; a number of papers address how the conceptual system and/or aspects of language use may interact. Unifying the various approaches and perspectives is an attempt to furnish hypotheses concerning prin ciples of phrase structure with some sort of independent justification. 1. PHRASE STRUCTURE THEORY: A BRIEF HISTORY A basic outline for a theory of phrase structure theory is accepted by all of the authors here; it is known as 'X-bar theory'. The concepts of X-bar theory are expressed in some form by a number of pre-generative linguists. For example, Bloomfield (1933) contrasted endocentric struc tures such as noun phrases and verb phrases with those he considered exocentric, e. g. prepositional phrases and clauses. Jespersen (1933), while presenting a functional system of description (in terms of 'ranks', where rank one is 'nominal', for example), clarified the relations among the head of a phrase, its modifier, and a phrase which modifies the modifier.

V, ThemelPatients to the lowest specifier of V', and Agents to a position outside the minimal VP. Again, thematic information is encoded in terms of configurational properties. Addressing the issue of phrase structure in another domain, Margaret Speas investigates the status of null pronominal objects in Navajo. Following Rizzi (1986), she assumes that null pronouns must meet both a licensing and an identification condition. More specifically, she demonstrates that distributional restrictions on null pronominal objects in Navajo can be explained if it is assumed that null objects obey the identification condition expressed by the Generalized Control Rule of Huang (1984). Distinguishing three types of null objects, she argues that relevant licensing condition on two subtypes of null objects involves rich agreement. However, it appears that there are languages lacking rich agreement but with pro in object position. Speas accounts for these phenomena by a rule of economy of projection. A second series of papers is concerned with the way in which functional categories derive aspects of sentential interpretation. Three issues in this research program are investigated here: external arguments as arguments of functional projections (Kratzer), the specificity interpretation of clitics (Sportiche), and the interpretation of tense (Stowell). In all three cases, phrase structure is put to use to derive interpretive effects. Angelika Kratzer proposes that external arguments are not part of the verb.