The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism

© editorial matter and organization Cedric Boeckx 2011. © chapters their several authors 2011. All rights reserved. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism provides a complete assessment of the achievements and challenges of the Minimalist Program. Established fifteen years ago by Noam Chomsky, with the aim of making all statements about language as simple and general as possible, linguistic minimalism is now at the centre of efforts to understand how the human language faculty operates in the mind and manifests itself in languages. In the book, researchers from all over the world explore the origins of the program, the course of its sometimes highly technical research, and its connections with other disciplines, such as parallel developments in fields like developmental biology, cognitive science, computational science, and philosophy of mind. The authors examine every aspect of the enterprise, show how each part relates to the whole, and set out current methodological and theoretical issues and proposals. The various articles in the book trace the development of minimalist ideas in linguistics, highlight their significance and distinctive character, and relate minimalist research and aims to those in parallel fields. They focus on core aspects in syntax, including feature, case, phrase structure, derivations, and representations; and on interface issues within the grammar. The articles also take minimalism outside the domain of grammar to consider its role in closely related biolinguistic projects, including the evolution of mind and language, and the relation between language and thought.