Bare SyntaxThis important contribution to the Minimalist Program offers a comprehensive theory of locality and new insights into phrase structure and syntactic cartography. It unifies central components of the grammar and increases the symmetry in syntax. Its central hypothesis has broad empirical application and at the same time reinforces the central premise of minimalism that language is an optimal system. Cedric Boeckx focuses on two core components of grammar: phrase structure and locality. He argues that the domains which render syntactic processes local (such as islands, bounding nodes, barriers, and phases in all their cartographic manifestations) are better understood once reduced to, or combined with, the basic syntactic operation, Merge, and its core representation, the X-bar schema. In a detailed examination of the mechanism of phrasal projection or labelling he shows that viewing chains as X-bar phrases allows conditions on chain formation or movement to be captured. Clearly argued, accessibly written, and illustrated with examples from a wide range of languages, Bare Syntax will appeal to linguists and others interested in syntactic theory at graduate level and above. |
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adjunction Agree agreement analysis anaphors antecedent approach argued argument bare phrase structure Boeckx Bošković c-command Cambridge capture cartographies chains and projections Chapter characterize checking Chomsky Chomsky's Cinque claim clause Clitic complementizer condition context derivation discussed Distributed Morphology Doctoral dissertation domain ellipsis extended projections extraction fact feature feature-checking forthcoming functional grammar Grohmann head Hornstein instances interfaces Internal Merge island effects island repair John Benjamins Kayne labeling Lasnik lexical categories lexical items lexicon linear Linguistic Inquiry Linguistic Theory locality long-distance mapping maximal minimal minimalist program Minimalist Syntax morphology movement moving element multiple narrow syntax natural language Nunes Oxford University Press parasitic gap Pesetsky PHON phrase structure pied-piping Pietroski Probe Probe-Goal relation product of Merge relevant representation requirement resumptive pronoun Rizzi Seely semantic sluicing specific subextraction symmetry syntactic syntactic objects thematic tion unambiguous University of Maryland Uriagereka verb wh-in-situ wh-movement wh-phrase X-bar schema