Bare Syntax

This important contribution to the Minimalist Program offers a comprehensive theory of locality and new insights into phrase structure and syntactic cartography. It unifies central components of the grammar, increases the symmetry in syntax, and reinforces the central premise of minimalism that language is an optimal system.

Cedric Boeckx is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University. His books include Linguistic Minimalism (OUP 2006) and Understanding Minimalist Syntax (Blackwell 2007).

There is no working syntactician like Boeckx. He can take a very simple theoretically important idea and use his encyclopedic knowledge of grammatical phenomena from an apparently endless number of languages to empirically elaborate its consequences in fascinating detail. In this important book, he develops an analogy between chains and projections and considers its theoretical consequences in a minimalist setting. He then shows how these rich ideas can be used to rationalize the cartographic enterprise. It is a great book and will, I believe, change how we think of these issues hereon in. Norbert Hornstein, Professor of Linguistics, University of Maryland ...brilliant book...Anyone who is interested in generative biolinguistics should read this book: it clearly presents how a working syntactician approaches concrete empirical problems under minimalist guidelines. Naoki Fukui ...a very welcome new addition...offers a fresh and stimulating perspective on core issues... Barbara Citko, Journal of Linguistics