Books in the Linguistic Inquiry Monographs series

This minimalist study proposes that the computational system of human language must consist of strictly local operations.

"A syntactic analysis of and solution to the semantic problem: how can speakers convey the same meaning using different speech acts?"--

A proposal that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a "person space" at the heart of every pronominal expression.

An examination of the evidence for and the theoretical implications of a universal word order constraint, with data from a wide range of languages.

A groundbreaking, comprehensive formal theory of grammatical person that recasts its empirical foundations and re-envisions its theoretical core.

An extended argument for a syntactic view of NEG raising with consequences for the syntax of negation and negative polarity items.

A proposal for a radical new view of case morphology, supported by a detailed investigation of some of the thorniest topics in Russian grammar.

The first book-length treatment of Japanese phonology from the perspective of Optimality Theory.

An argument for the universal syntactic nature of the composition of manner and motion in human languages; with a wealth of empirical evidence from Germanic, Korean, and Romance languages.

A theory of control, equally grounded in syntax and semantics, that argues that obligatory control is achieved either through predication or through logophoric anchoring.

A new theory of labeling that sheds light on such syntactic phenomena as relativization, successive cyclicity, island phenomena, and Minimality effects.

A view of the locality conditions on vowel harmony, aligning empirical phenomena within phonology with the principles of the Minimalist program.

An exploration of the architecture of the grammar, where conditions apply, and the nature of the lexical/functional split.

Investigates the relationship between the syntactic and semantic representations of sentences within the framework of generative grammar. Diesing also considers the problem of deriving logical representations from syntactic representations of sentences.

A radically new approach to argument structure in the minimalist program.

An argument that agreement and agreementless languages are unified under an expanded view of grammatical features including both phi-features and certain discourse configurational features.

An argument that the word order of a given language is largely predictable from independently observable facts about its phonology and morphology.

A proposal for a compositional semantics for subjunctive (or would) conditionals in English.

A novel view of the syntax-semantics interface that analyzes the behavior of indefinite objects.

The central idea of this book is that movement and phrase structure are not independent properties of grammar; instead, movement is triggered by the geometry of phrase structure. Using this idea of "Dynamic antisymmetry", the book analyzes the consequences for the design of grammar.

A study of indefinites in Maori and Chamorro and their relevance to the interaction of compositional semantic interpretation and syntactic structure.

A comprehensive theory of selective opacity effects-configurations in which syntactic domains are opaque to some processes but transparent to others-within a Minimalist framework.

A systematic exposition of Reinhart's Theta System, with extensive annotations and essays that capture subsequent developments.

An investigation of the syntactic structure of voice and v, using Acehnese (Malayo-Polynesian) as the empirical starting point.