Competition in Syntax

Over the last decade, the notion of competition has come to play a major role in syntactic theory, particularly in minmalist and optimality-theoretic syntax. According to this view, a sentence can only be grammatical if it is "optimal" in a set of competing candidates with respect to a given evaluation metric-economy in the minimalist program. Focussing on the latter, the contributions in this book critically investigate the viability of competition in syntax.