Elementary Syntactic Structures Prospects of a Feature-Free Syntax Cambridge Studies in Linguistics Series

Most syntacticians, no matter their theoretical persuasion, agree that features (types or categories) are the most important units of analysis. Within Chomskyan generative grammar, the importance of features has grown steadily and within minimalism, it can be said that everything depends on features. They are obstacles in any interdisciplinary investigation concerning the nature of language and it is hard to imagine a syntactic description that does not explore them. For the first time, this book turns grammar upside down and proposes a new model of syntax that is better suited for interdisciplinary interactions, and shows how syntax can proceed free of lexical influence. The empirical domain examined is vast, and all the fundamental units and properties of syntax (categories, parameters, Last Resort, labelling, and hierarchies) are rethought. Opening up new avenues of investigation, this book will be invaluable to researchers and students in syntactic theory, and linguistics more broadly.

Preface; Abbreviations and symbols; 1. Biolinguistic concerns; 2. Syntactic order for free: merge α; 3. Trusting in the external systems: descent with modification; 4. Elaborate grammatical structures: how (and where) to deal with variation; 5. Interdisciplinary prospects; Appendix 1. Déjà vu all over again?; Appendix 2. Switching metaphors: from clocks to sandpiles; Appendix 3. More on the loss of syntactic variation; Bibliography; Index.

Cedric Boeckx is Research Professor at ICREA (The Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies) and a member of the Department of Linguistics at Universitat de Barcelona.