The Minimalist Program has advanced a research program that builds the design of human language from conceptual necessity. Seminal proposals by Frampton & Gutmann (1999, 2000, 2002) introduced the notion that an ideal syntactic theory should be ‘crash-proof’. Such a version of the Minimalist Program (or any other linguistic theory) would not permit syntactic operations to produce structures that ‘crash’. There have, however, been some recent developments in Minimalism – especially those that approach linguistic theory from a biolinguistic perspective (cf. Chomsky 2005 et seq.) – that have called the pursuit of a ‘crash-proof grammar’ into serious question. The papers in this volume take on the daunting challenge of defining exactly what a ‘crash’ is and what a ‘crash-proof grammar’ would look like, and of investigating whether or not the pursuit of a ‘crash-proof grammar’ is biolinguistically appealing.

The Meaning of Language illustrates the diversity of approaches in linguistics. The volume revolves around two main chapters authored by two internationally acknowledged Scandinavian scholars, Hans Basbøll and Stig Eliasson. Basbøll’s contribution is the most detailed and coherent English-language presentation of the pioneering Danish 18th century linguist Jens Pedersen Høysgaard and his work, and Eliasson explores the intricacy of the issue of whether morphology can be borrowed between languages and the mechanisms of actual borrowings. The other contributions illustrate which topics may be taken up by language scholars today, from metaphor, regional phonology, morphology and syntax, language learning, discourse analysis, intensifier semantics, and Indo-European, to the interface between language and logic. The approaches invoke a wide spectrum of theoretical models and assumptions.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

Explains and explores the central premises of OT and the results of their praxis.

This volume focuses on the role of the postulated derivational and filtering devices in current linguistic theory and aims to promote the exchange of ideas between the proponents of MP and OT in order to evaluate the role of these devices in the two frameworks. It sheds more light on the tenability of the often proclaimed opinion that MP and OT are incompatible frameworks given that the explanatory power of the former mainly resides on the generative device whereas the explanatory power of the latter mainly resides in the filtering device. Papers from various perspectives discuss and compare the two devices in the two frameworks. The volume thus collects a large number of the arguments in favour of more a strictly derivational approach, a more strictly filtering approach, or a more hybrid approach. The book will be of interest to any researcher or advanced student in Linguistic Theory. It is more specifically directed to syntacticians working within the current frameworks that have developed from Chomsky's minimalist program (MP) and Prince and Smolensky's Optimality Theory (OT).