The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism

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.

• 1. Some Roots of Minimalism in Generative Grammar ; 2. Features in Minimalist Syntax ; 3. Case ; 4. Merge and Bare Phrase Structure ; 5. Structure and Order: Asymmetric Merge ; 6. Multidominance ; 7. The Copy Theory ; 8. A-bar Dependencies ; 9. Head-Movement and the Minimalist Program ; 10. Minimality ; 11. Derivational Cycles ; 12. Anti-Locality: Too-close Relations in Grammar ; 13. Derivation(s) ; 14. No Derivation Without Representation ; 15. Last Resort with Move and Agree in Derivations and Representations ; 16. Optionality ; 17. Syntax and Interpretation Systems: How is their labour Divided? ; 18. Minimalist Construal: Two Approaches to A and B ; 19. A Minimalist Approach to Argument Structure ; 20. Minimalist Semantics ; 21. Minimal Semantic Instructions ; 22. Language and Thought ; 23. Parameters ; 24. Minimalism and Language Acquisition ; 25. A Minimalist Program for Phonology ; 26. Minimizing Language Evolution: The Minimalist Program and teh Evolutionary Shaping of Language ; 27. Computational perspectives on Minimalism ; Bibliography ; Index

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.