The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism

Edited by Cedric Boeckx

Oxford Handbooks

The first authoritative, state of the art survey of minimalism
Presents material in an accessible form
Draws together a distinguished group of international scholars

The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism

Edited by Cedric Boeckx

Description

This Handbook provides a complete assessment of the current achievements and challenges of the Minimalist Program. Established 15 years ago by Noam Chomsky with the aim of making all statements about language as simple and general as possible, linguistic minimalism is now at the centre of efforts to understand how the human language faculty operates in the mind and manifests itself in languages. In this book leading researchers from all over the world explore the origins of the program, the course of its sometimes highly technical research, and its connections with other disciplines, such as parallel developments in fields such as developmental biology, cognitive science, computational science, and philosophy of mind. The authors examine every aspect of the enterprise, show how each part relates to the whole, and set out current methodological and theoretical issues and proposals.

The various chapters in this book trace the development of minimalist ideas in linguistics, highlight their significance and distinctive character, and relate minimalist research and aims to those in parallel fields. They focus on core aspects in syntax, including feature, case, phrase structure, derivations, and representations, and on interface issues within the grammar. They also take minimalism outside the domain of grammar to consider its role in closely related biolinguistic projects, including the evolution of mind and language and the relation between language and thought. The handbook is designed and written to meet the needs of students and scholars in linguistics and cognitive science at graduate level and above, as well as to provide a guide to the field for researchers other disciplines.

The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism

Edited by Cedric Boeckx

Oxford Handbooks

1. Some Roots of Minimalism in Generative Grammar, Robert Freidin and Howard Lasnik
2. Features in Minimalist Syntax, David Adger and Peter Svenonius
3. Case, David Pesetsky and Esther Torrego
4. Merge and Bare Phrase Structure, Naoki Fukui
5. Structure and Order: Asymmetric Merge, Jan-Wouter Zwart
6. Multidominance, barbara Citko
7. The Copy Theory, Jairo Nunes
8. A-bar Dependencies, Norvin Richards
9. Head-Movement and the Minimalist Program, Ian Roberts
10. Minimality, Luigi Rizzi
11. Derivational Cycles, Juan Uriagereka
12. Anti-Locality: Too-close Relations in Grammar, Kleanthes K. Grohmann
13. Derivation(s), Samuel D. Epstein, Hisatsugu Kitahara, and T. Daniel Seely
14. No Derivation Without Representation, Robert Chametzky
15. Last Resort with Move and Agree in Derivations and Representations, Zeljko Boskovic
16. Optionality, Shigeru Miyagawa
17. Syntax and Interpretation Systems: How is their labour Divided?, Eric Reuland
18. Minimalist Construal: Two Approaches to A and B, Alex Drummond, Dave Kush, and Norbert Hornstein
19. A Minimalist Approach to Argument Structure, Heidi Harley
20. Minimalist Semantics, Gillian Ramchand
21. Minimal Semantic Instructions, Paul Pietroski
22. Language and Thought, Wolfram Hinzen
23. Parameters, Angel Gallego
24. Minimalism and Language Acquisition, Charles Yang and Tom Roeper
25. A Minimalist Program for Phonology, Bridget Samuels
26. Minimizing Language Evolution: The Minimalist Program and teh Evolutionary Shaping of Language, Victor Longa, Guillermo Lorenzo, and Juan Uriagereka
27. Computational perspectives on Minimalism, Ed Stabler
Bibliography
Index

The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism

Edited by Cedric Boeckx

Oxford Handbooks

Author Information

Cedric Boeckx is Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA) and a member of the Center for Theoretical Linguistics at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. He was previously Associate Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University. He is the author of Islands and Chains (Benjamins, 2003), Linguistic Minimalism, and Bare Syntax (OUP 2006; 2008), and Language in Cognition (Wiley, 2009). He has published numerous articles in journals such as Linguistic Inquiry and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.

Contributors:

David Adger, Queen Mary, University of London
Cedric Boeckx, ICREA
Zeljko Boskovic, University of Connecticut
Robert Chametzky, The University of Iowa
Barbara Citko, University of Washington in Seattle
Alex Drummond, University of Maryland
Samuel D. Epstein, University of Michigan
Robert Freidin, Princeton University
Naoki Fukui, Sophia University
Angel Gallego, The Autonomous University of Barcelona
Kleanthes K. Grohmann, University of Cyprus
Heidi Harley, University of Arizona
Wolfram Hinzen, Durham University
Norbert Hornstein, University of Maryland
Hisatsugu Kitahara, Keio University
Dave Kush, University of Maryland
Howard Lasnik, University of Maryland
Victor Longa, University of Santiago de Compostela
Guillermo Lorenzo, University of Oviedo
Shigeru Miyagawa, Massachusetts Instittute of Technology
Jairo Nunes, Sao Paulo University
David Pesetsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Paul Pietroski, University of Maryland
Gillian Ramchand, University of Tromso
Eric Reuland, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics
Norvin Richards, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Luigi Rizzi, University of Siena
Ian Roberts, University of Cambridge
Tom Roeper, University of Massachusetts
Bridget Samuels, University of Maryland, College Park
T. Daniel Seely, Eastern Michigan University
Ed Stabler, University of California, Los Angeles
Peter Svenonius, University of Tromso
Esther Torrego, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Juan Uriagereka, University of Maryland
Charles Yang, University of Pennsylvania
Jan-Wouter Zwart, University of Groningen

The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism

Edited by Cedric Boeckx

Oxford Handbooks

Reviews and Awards

"The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism is an excellent book....it is a 'must read' for anyone interested in generative linguistics in particular, and in theoretical linguistics in general. It should be further mentioned that the articles are impeccably written by known linguists and philosophers with an exceptional awareness of the linguistic bibliography, and very well edited."--Linguist List