The essays in this book present explicit syntactic analyses that adhere to programmatic minimalist guidelines. Thus they show how the guiding ideas of minimalism can shape the construction of a new, more explanatory theory of the syntactic component of the human language faculty.
Contributors: Zeljko Boskovic, Samuel David Epstein, Robert Freidin, Erich M. Groat, Norbert Hornstein, Hisatsugu Kitahara, Howard Lasnik, Roger Martin, Jairo Nunes, Norvin Richards, Juan Uriagereka, Amy Weinberg
According to Peter Ludlow, there is a very close relation between the structure of natural language and that of reality, and one can gain insights into long-standing metaphysical questions by studying the semantics of natural language. In this book Ludlow uses the metaphysics of time as a case study and focuses on the dispute between A-theorists and B-theorists about the nature of time. According to B-theorists, there is no genuine change, but a permanent sequence of events ordered by an earlier-than/later-than relation.
The study of the relationship between natural language and spatial cognition has the potential to yield answers to vexing questions about the nature of the mind, language, and culture. The fifteen original contributions in Language and Space bring together the major lines of research and the most important theoretical viewpoints in the areas of psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and neuroscience, providing a much needed synthesis across these diverse domains.Each chapter gives a clear up-to-date account of a particular research program.
In this technical monograph, Paul Postal deals with several issues that inexplicably have been treated only marginally in the development of current linguistic theorizing. He focuses on three problems in syntactic theory that are connected to "extraction"—the occurrence of an element in a distinguished position distinct from its unmarked locus in simple clauses. He examines a largely ignored body of systematic contrasts among known extraction types, the status of the Coordinate Structure Constraint, and the phenomenon of Right Node Raising.
