1. Convergence at first sight, and differences in a second time From the early days of the minimalist program of Chomsky (1993), a convergence with categorial grammars was noticed by Ep-stein and Berwick (1995). The striking similarity lies in the merge operation, which looks like the application rule of the AB grammars. In both cases, word order is a consequence of the consumption rules but in...

Syntactic theories differ with respect to how they determine the wellformedness or illformedness of a given sentence Si in a given language. One possibility is that the decision of whether Si is grammatical or not can be made by exclusively considering properties of Si ; properties of other sentences S j , Sk , ... are irrelevant. Another possibility is that properties of other sentences S j , ...

0. Introduction In developing generative theories of syntax the challenge has long been to reconcile two opposite kinds of empirical evidence. On the one hand, there is substantial evidence that languages of the world are deeply similar; on the other, there is also substantial evidence that they differ on the surface. For example, there are languages which allow sentences without a pronounced s...

This book contains 10 essays written in honor of Howard Lasnik, as well as an introduction by two of the editors, a list of Lasnik's publications, a list of dissertations supervised by Lasnik, and an index. The dust jacket describes the contents asàn up-to-date overview of research in the minimalist program of linguistic theory'. As such, this review considers the book as a window onto current ...

This paper reconsiders the status of parameters and parametric variation from the perspective of recent developments within the minimalist program, in particular the problem that arises if parameters can no longer be part of UG, which must be maximally empty, and if variation is instead to be explained in terms of third-factor considerations (section 1). I pursue the idea that variation arises ...