First Published in 1999. This book is divided into two parts. The first part is essentially a response to a minimalist question: how perfect is language? There are so many factors involved in hiding the true nature of a language from casual observers. On the other hand, it is a lot easier to put a few languages side by side and show that the apparent imperfection actually comes from the diversity of their lexicons. By comparing wh-construals in Chinese, Japanese, English and Hindi, it becomes clear that these languages follow an optimal design of operator-variable dependencies as best as they could. As best as their individual morphologies allow, for that matter. The second part of this book addresses the issue how syntax interacts with semantics in a minimalist way.

*** Pre-Order The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, second edition, publishing December 2017. Find out more at www.companiontosyntax.com *** This long-awaited reference work marks the culmination of numerous years of research and international collaboration by the world's leading syntacticians. There exists no other comparable collection of research that documents the development of syntax in this way. Under the editorial direction of Martin Everaert and Henk van Riemsdijk, this 5 volume set comprises 70 case studies commissioned specifically for this volume. The 80 contributors are drawn from an international group of prestigious linguists, including Joe Emonds, Sandra Chung, Susan Rothstein, Adriana Belletti, Jim Huang, Howard Lasnik, and Marcel den Dikken, among many others. A unique collection of 70 newly-commissioned case studies, offering access to research completed over the last 40 years. Brings together the world’s leading syntacticians to provide a large and diverse number of case studies in the field. Explores a comprehensive range of syntax topics from an historical perspective. Investigates empirical domains which have been well-documented and which have played a prominent role in theoretical syntax at some stage in the development of generative grammar. Serves as a research tool for not only theoretical linguistics but also the various forms of applied linguistics. Contains an accessible alphabetical structure, with an index integral to each volume featuring keywords and key figures. Each multi-volume set is also accompanied by a CD Rom of the entire Companion. Like the prestigious Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics series, this multi-volume work, in the new The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Linguistics series, can be relied upon to deliver the quality and expertise with which Blackwell Publishing’s linguistics list is associated.

Over the past twenty years or so, the work on Japanese within generative grammar has shifted from primarily using contemporary theory to describe Japanese to contributing directly to general theory, on top of producing extensive analyses of the language. The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Linguistics captures the excitement that comes from answering the question, "What can Japanese say about Universal Grammar?" Each of the eighteen chapters takes up a topic in syntax, morphology, acquisition, processing, phonology, or information structure, and, first of all, lays out the core data, followed by critical discussion of the various approaches found in the literature. Each chapter ends with a section on how the study of the particular phenomenon in Japanese contributes to our knowledge of general linguistic theory. This book will be useful to students and scholars of linguistics who are interested in the latest studies on one of the most extensively studied languages within generative grammar.

This edited volume provides new insights into the architecture of Chinese grammar from a comparative perspective, using principles of cartography. The chapters in this book map out the "topography" of a variety of constructions in Chinese, specifically information structure, wh-question formation, and peripheral functional elements. The syntactic structure of Chinese makes it an ideal language for this line of research, offering a window into the origin of heavily "scrambled" constructions often observed in other languages.

Over the last two decades, functional heads have been one of the privileged objects of research in generative linguistics. However, within this line of inquiry, two alternative approaches have developed: while the cartographic project considers crosslinguistic evidence as crucial for a complete mapping of functional heads in universal grammar, minimalist accounts tend to consider structural economy as literally involving a reduction in the number of available heads. In this volume, some of the most influential linguists who have participated in this long-lasting debate offer their recent work in short, self-contained case studies. The contributions cover all the main layers of recently studied syntactic structure, including such major areas of empirical research as grammaticalization and language change, standard and non-standard varieties, interface issues, and morphosyntax. Functional Heads attempts to map aspects of syntactic structure according to the cartographic approach, and in doing so demonstrates that the differences between cartography and minimalism are perhaps more superficial than substantial.

Parameters of linguistic variation were originally conceived, within the chomskyan Principles and Parameters Theory, as UG-determined options that were associated with grammatical principles and had a rich deductive structure. This characterization of parametric differences among languages has changed significantly over the years, especially so with the advent of Minimalism. This book collects a representative sample of current generative research on the status, origin and size of parameters. Often taking diverging views, the papers in the volume address some or all of the main debated topics in parametric syntax: i.e. are parameters provided by UG, or do they constitute emergent properties arising from points of underspecification?; in which component(s) of the language faculty are parameters to be found?; do clustering effects actually hold across languages?; do macroparameters exist alongside microparameters?; are there parameter hierarchies?; which is the origin and role of parameters in the process of language acquisition? The volume is organized into two parts. Part I ("The nature of variation and parameters") brings together studies whose main goal is to discuss general issues related to parameters (or variation more generally). Part II ("Parameters in the analysis of language variation: case studies") includes a number of works that deal with the empirical basis and proper formulation of well-known particular parameters: the Null Subject Parameter, the NP/DP Parameter, the Compounding Parameter, the Wh-Parameter and the Analyticity Parameter.