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...

The most comprehensive state-of-the-field survey of biolinguistics available.

Most syntacticians, no matter their theoretical persuasion, agree that features (types or categories) are the most important units of analysis. Within Chomskyan generative grammar, the importance of features has grown steadily and within minimalism, it can be said that everything depends on features. They are obstacles in any interdisciplinary investigation concerning the nature of language and it is hard to imagine a syntactic description that does not explore them. For the first time, this book turns grammar upside down and proposes a new model of syntax that is better suited for...

This volume brings together various strands of research focusing on aspects of the syntax of agreement, and the role that agreement plays in linguistic theory. The essays collected here show how and why agreement has emerged in recent years as the central theoretical construct in minimalism. Although the theoretical context of the volume is minimalist in character, Boeckx formulates formal and substantive universals in the domain of agreement.