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. Most recently he was Associate Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University. He is the author of Islands and Chains (2003), Linguistic Minimalism (2006), Understanding Minimalist Syntax (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), and Bare Syntax (2008); and the founding co-editor, with Kleanthes K. Grohmann, of the Open Access journal Biolinguistics.

• Acknowledgements ProloguePart I: Ever Since ChomskyChapter 1: Mind matters: Chomsky’s dangerous ideaChapter 2: The mechanization of the mind pictureChapter 3: How the mind grows: From Meno to NoamPart II: Unweaving the sentenceChapter 4: Mental chemistryChapter 5: The variety of linguistic experience: The towers of Babel and PisaChapter 6: All the roads lead to Universal GrammarPart III: The mental foundations of behaviorChapter 7: Making sense of meaning: An instruction manualChapter 8: Wonderful mental life: Unthinkable in the absence of LanguageChapter 9: Grammar caught in the actPart IV: Missing linksChapter 10: The (mis)measure of mindChapter 11: Homo combinansChapter 12: Computational organologyEpilogueNotesStudy guideReferencesIndex

"Amongst the book's strengths, particularly commendable are the connections made to other cognitive domains and the biological sciences." (The Linguist, July 2010) "Although each subsection is brief, the author includes chapter-by-chapter notes of cited material at the end of the text. The motivated reader will have no trouble tracking down the primary sources that the author discusses." (PsycCRITIQUES, March 2010)