The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism

ISBN-13: 9780199549368 / Angielski / Twarda / 2011 / 640 str.

Cedric Boeckx

Opis

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.

Recenzje

an excellent book. As a whole, it manages to capture the main conceptual and technical issues raised in the current minimalist framework in an almost unitary fashion. Taken separately, the chapters of the handbook are, without exception, complete studies dedicated to certain problems. ... Each chapter is also characterized by a remarkable intellectual honesty: the limits and imperfections of the proposed accounts are clearly stated, and the controversial issues are not swept under the rug. The Handbook is an inestimable source of new ideas to be explored in future research, and sets the agenda for future linguistic (but not only linguistic)theorizing, and, at the same time, represents a testimony to the prestige held by generative linguistics in the last half of the previous century. It thus goes without saying that it is a "must read" for anyone interested in generative linguistics in particular, and in theoretical linguistics in general.

O autorze

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.