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.

In this book, Ian Roberts argues that the essential insight of the principles-and-parameters approach to variation can be maintained - albeit in a somewhat different guise - in the context of the minimalist programme. The book represents a significant new contribution to the formal study of cross-linguistic morphosyntactic variation.

This book offers new work by some major figures in the field of linguistics, addressing old debates from the perspective of current explanatory grammatical theory. These include paradigmatic relations among words, and agreeing adjectives and their grammatical source. Covering a broad range of empirical domains, the contributors of this volume examine the role of Economy in syntax and in syntactic interfaces with phonology and semantics, and their implications for processing. The evidence is taken from a great variety of languages, including Arabic dialects, Basque, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Latin, and Spanish. Two chapters on metrics complete honoring Carlos Piera s longstanding scholarship in linguistic theory within Spain and abroad."

This book is an endeavor to present and analyze some standard topics in the grammar of Basque from a micro-comparative perspective. From case and agreement to word order and the left periphery, and including an incursion into determiners, the book combines fine-grained theoretical analyses with empirically detailed descriptions. Working from a micro-parametric perspective, the contributions to the volume address in depth some of the exuberant variation attested in the different dialects and subdialects of Basque. At the same time, although the contributions focus mainly on Basque data, cross-linguistic evidence is also presented and discussed. After all, the goal pursued in this book is to attempt to explain variation in Basque as a particular instantiation of variation in human language at large. The volume presents and analyzes a wide range of empirical phenomena, many typologically marked among European languages, and will therefore be a welcome resource to linguists looking for detailed description and/or theoretical discussion.

Parameters have lain at the core of linguistic research in the generative tradition for decades. The theoretical questions they have raised are deep and broad: this reference text investigates how contemporary linguistics has best tried to answer them. This book looks at how parameters might be properly defined and what their locus might be :lexical information, functional heads, the computational system, the phonological branch of the grammar. What kind of data forms trigger acquisition of a parameter? Are parameters necessary or can we study languages without making reference to them? The questions looked at are not just theoretical: how can a theory of parameters be used to help understand second language acquisition, and what contributions can it make to the study of language typology? This is the right time to gather all this information, dispersed in many different kinds of publications by single authors and groups, into one comprehensive volume.

In view of its exploratory nature, Chomsky's 'minimalist' model has undergone multiple changes, triggering in response numerous proposals that are consistent with the tendencies that it follows or anticipates, and numerous proposals that offer alternatives to it. A good illustration of the variety of 'parallel' proposals is provided in the present volume. The articles derive from papers read at the "Challenges of Minimalism" session of the Open Linguistics Forum, held in Ottawa, in March 1997. This OLF meeting started as a graduate student initiative, but because of the topic chosen, attracted a wide and international audience. The twenty contributions are grouped in five sections: I. Syntactic Structure, Relations, Operations; II. Syntactic Movement: Cyclicity, Optionality, (Non)overtness; III.Case, Topic, Focus, Interrogativity; IV. Ellipsis, Reconstruction and Related Phenomena; V. DPs: Features and Syntactic Relations.

This volume focuses on different aspects of language development. The contributions are concerned with similarities and differences between first and second language acquisition, the acquisition of sentence structure and functional categories, cross-linguistic influence in bilingual first language acquisition as well as the relation between language acquisition, language contact and diachronic change. The recurrent topic of the volume is the link between linguistic variation and the limitation of structural variability in the framework of a well-defined theory of language. In this respect, the volume opens up new perspectives for future research.

This book is a collection of articles dealing with various aspects of grammatical relations and argument structure in the languages of Europe and North and Central Asia (LENCA). Topics covered with respect to individual languages are: split-intransitivity (Basque), causativization (Agul), transitives and causatives (Korean and Japanese), aspectual domain and quantification (Finnish and Udmurt), head-marking principles (Athabaskan languages), and pragmatics (Eastern Khanty and Xibe). Typology of argument-structure properties of 'give' (LENCA), typology of agreement systems, asymmetry in argument structure, typology of the Amdo Sprachbund, spatial realtors (Northeastern Turkic), core argument patterns (languages of Northern California), and typology of grammatical relations (LENCA) are the topics of articles based on cross-linguistic data. The broad empirical sweep and the fine-tuned theoretical analysis highlight the central role of argument structure and grammatical relations with respect to a plethora of linguistic phenomena.

This book introduces formal grammar theories that play a role in current linguistic theorizing (Phrase Structure Grammar, Transformational Grammar/Government & Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Head-​Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Construction Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar). The key assumptions are explained and it is shown how the respective theory treats arguments and adjuncts, the active/passive alternation, local reorderings, verb placement, and fronting of constituents over long distances. The analyses are explained with German as the object language. The second part of the book compares these approaches with respect to their predictions regarding language acquisition and psycholinguistic plausibility. The nativism hypothesis, which assumes that humans posses genetically determined innate language-specific knowledge, is critically examined and alternative models of language acquisition are discussed. The second part then addresses controversial issues of current theory building such as the question of flat or binary branching structures being more appropriate, the question whether constructions should be treated on the phrasal or the lexical level, and the question whether abstract, non-visible entities should play a role in syntactic analyses. It is shown that the analyses suggested in the respective frameworks are often translatable into each other. The book closes with a chapter showing how properties common to all languages or to certain classes of languages can be captured.

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.