Baltin M., Collins C. (eds.) The Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory

Blackwell Publishing, 2001. — 874 pp. — (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics).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.
All syntactic theories recognize that syntax makes infinite use of finite means, but there is a fundamental distinction between theories as to how this is done. Some theories postulate a derivational approach, where structures are built incrementally by various operations (such as Merge and Move in the Minimalist Program). In other theories, structures are taken as given, and they are evaluated with respect to various conditions. The issue of derivation versus representation has proved to be one of the most elusive and difficult to settle in syntactic theory. Even researchers who otherwise adopt very similar sets of assumptions will differ as to whether they consider syntax to be derivational or representational.Derivation versus Representation
Explaining Morphosyntactic Competition
Economy Conditions in Syntax
Derivation and Representation in Modern Transformational Syntax
Relativized Minimality Effects
Movement
Head Movement
Object Shift and Scrambling
Wh-in-situ Languages
A-Movements
Argument Structure and Phrase Structure
Thematic Relations in Syntax
Predication
Case
Phrase Structure
The Natures of Nonconfigurationality
What VP Ellipsis Can Do, and What it Can’t, but not Why
Functional Projections
Agreement Projections
Sentential Negation
The DP Hypothesis: Identifying Clausal Properties in the Nominal Domain
The Structure of DPs: Some Principles, Parameters, and Problems
Interface with Interpretation
The Syntax of Scope
Deconstructing Binding
Syntactic Reconstruction Effects
External Evaluation of Syntax
Syntactic Change
Setting Syntactic Parameters