Table of Contents

1: Introduction
2: Subjacency Forever
3: Featural Cyclicity and the Ordering of Multiple Specifiers
4: Grappling with the Ineffable
5: The Principle of Minimal Compliance
6: Conclusion
Bibliography

About the Author

Norvin Richards is Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT. Past positions include Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts (1997-8), and Post-doctoral Researcher at the Kanda University of International Studies, Makuhari, Japan (1998-9).

Reviews

strongly recommend[ed] to anybody interested in the theory of wh-movement and its variation across languages. Journal of Linguistics While there are some inspiring ideas that require further development and some concrete analyses to be worked out in detail, this book surely sheds new light on the crosslinguistic variation in wh-movement, interactions of multiple applications of wh-movement, and well-formedness conditions on movement chains. It touches upon numerous theoretically important issues which should attract much attention and it also comes to grips with various phenomena from a wide range of languages, some of which have received little attention in the literature. Journal of Linguistics The most innovative and striking part of this book is the analysis proposed for the ordering of elements moved to multiple specifiers, which is determined by the notions of feature-based cyclicity and of Shortest. Journal of Linguistics ... the attempt to broaden the scope of investigation to handle a wide range of facts drawn from a variety of languages, and to give them a fairly detailed explanatory account within the minimalist program, makes this book a valuable contribution to the study of syntactic theory. Journal of Linguistics ... certainly one of the most important book-length contributions to minimalist syntax of the last years. It provides fresh insights into the nature of the shortest move / minimal link condition. The Principle of Minimal Compliance represents an original, stimulating way of dealing with the fact that syntactic constraints may fail to be respected by certain dependencies within a clause. And MiL offers an elegant theory of the distinction between overt and covert movement.