Blackwell Reference Online

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The goal of this Handbook is to provide an overview to researchers and students about the current state of research in syntax, a difficult but not impossible task because the field of syntax is not monolithic: there are schools of thought, and areas of disagreement, but there are also shared assumptions among many schools of thought which we shall try to bring out below. We decided to follow the twin paths of ecumenicalism and comprehensiveness of empirical coverage by focussing on areas of grammar for our coverage, rather than particular frameworks, of which there are several (Government Binding, Minimalism, Categorial Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, Head Driven Phrase Grammar). We intended no slight to these approaches and indeed while most of the chapters in this volume are written with a Minimalist/GB orientation (but not all of them), we would hope that the observations and analyses could serve as a point of departure for investigators in other frameworks. When we first agreed to edit the Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory for Blackwell, we did so in order to convey to others, both in and out of the field of syntax, the fascination that we constantly feel on an almost daily basis about how restricted syntactic systems, the systems of natural language that are responsible for the construction of sentences, are in comparison to what they could be. This emphasis, ... log in or subscribe to read full text