Minimalism and Beyond

The Minimalist Program is just that, a “program”. It is a challenge for syntacticians to reexamine the constructs of their models and ask what is minimally needed in order to accomplish the essential task of syntax – interfacing between form and meaning. This volume pushes Minimalism to its empirical and theoretical limits, and brings together some of the most innovative and radical ideas to have emerged in the attempt to reduce Universal Grammar to the bare output conditions imposed by these conceptually necessary interfaces. The contributors include both leading theoreticians and well-known practitioners of minimalism; the papers thus both respond to broad questions about the nature of human language and the architecture of grammar, and provide careful analyses of specific linguistic problems. Overarching issues of syntactic computation are considered, such as the role of formal features, the mechanics of movement and the property of displacement, the construction of words and phrases, the nature of Spell-Out, and, more generally, the forces driving operations. The volume has the potential to reach a wide audience, favoring inter-theoretical debate with a concise state-of-the-art panorama on Minimalism and advances about its future developments.

Noam Chomsky, MIT:
These deeply informed and carefully argued papers are very welcome. Speaking personally, my viewpoint is often somewhat different, but I am delighted to have these outstanding papers as a challenge and stimulus to thought, and am confident that others concerned with the fundamental nature of language will react the same way.