Preliminary Material / Peter W. Culicover and Louise McNally -- On Exploring the Limits of Syntax / Peter W. Culicover and Louise McNally -- The Architecture of the Language Faculty: A Neominimalist Perspective / Ray Jackendoff -- The Minimalist Impulse / Peter W. Culicover -- On Rheme and Kontrast / Enric Vallduví and Maria Vilkuna -- Focus, the Flow of Information, and Universal Grammar / Craige Roberts -- On the Linguistic Encoding of Information Packaging Instructions / Louise McNally -- A Minimalist Theory of Weak Islands / M. Rita Manzini -- The Syntax-Focus Structure Interface / Nomi Erteschik-Shir -- On the Distinction between Strong and Weak Islands: A Processing Perspective / Robert Kluender -- On the Limits of Syntax, with Reference to Left-Dislocation and Topicalization / Ellen F. Prince -- Where (If Anywhere) Is Transderivationality Located? / Pauline Jacobson -- Phonological Focus and Structural Focus / Michael S. Rochemont -- Where Is Syntax? Syntactic Aspects of Left Dislocation in Dutch and English / Jan-Wouter Zwart -- Index / Peter W. Culicover and Louise McNally -- Syntax and Semantics / Peter W. Culicover and Louise McNally.

The Limits of Syntax is a collection of original, never before published essays. Each essay explores the ways in which greater incorporation of nonsyntactic explanations into linguistic research may deepen our understanding of problematic linguistic phenomena and, at the same time, strengthen syntactic research. To clarify the limits of syntactic explanation, these essayists investigate four areas. The first is a set of general issues related to the theory of grammar and the place of syntax in it. The second set develops an explanation of the power of semantics pragmatics within a syntactic theory. The third addresses the status of syntactic constraints, and the fourth seeks to explain the triggering of movement in the so-called Minimalist Program and its derivational approach to syntactic representations. It seeks to refine the theory of syntax and encourages more adequate characterization of linguistic phenomena. The original papers form a coherent presentation.

Description based on print version record.