Minimalism and Beyond: Radicalizing the interfaces(11 Language Faculty and Beyond)

The Minimalist Program is just that, a “program”. It is a challenge for syntacticians to reexamine the constructs of their models and ask what is minimally needed in order to accomplish the essential task of syntax – interfacing between form and meaning. This volume pushes Minimalism to its empirical and theoretical limits, and brings together some of the most innovative and radical ideas to have emerged in the attempt to reduce Universal Grammar to the bare output conditions imposed by these conceptually necessary interfaces. The contributors include both leading theoreticians and well-known practitioners of minimalism; the papers thus both respond to broad questions about the nature of human language and the architecture of grammar, and provide careful analyses of specific linguistic problems. Overarching issues of syntactic computation are considered, such as the role of formal features, the mechanics of movement and the property of displacement, the construction of words and phrases, the nature of Spell-Out, and, more generally, the forces driving operations. The volume has the potential to reach a wide audience, favoring inter-theoretical debate with a concise state-of-the-art panorama on Minimalism and advances about its future developments.

Table of Contents:
1. Preface; 2. List of contributors; 3. I. Minimalism: Quo Vadis?; 4. A program for the Minimalist Program (by Hornstein, Norbert); 5. II. Exploring features in syntax; 6. On feature interpretability and inheritance (by Dikken, Marcel den); 7. On the need for formal features in the narrow syntax (by Putnam, Michael T.); 8. Adjunct Control and edge features (by Nunes, Jairo); 9. On the uninterpretability of interpretable features (by Zeijlstra, Hedde); 10. The Merge Condition: A syntactic approach to selection (by Wurmbrand, Susi); 11. III. Radicalizing the interfaces; 12. Chains in Minimalism (by Martin, Roger); 13. Multiattachment syntax, "Movement" effects, and Spell-Out (by Franks, Steven L.); 14. Flavors of movement: Revisiting the A/A' distinction (by Kosta, Peter); 15. Minimalism and I-Morphology (by Di Sciullo, Anna Maria); 16. A minimalist approach to roots (by Panagiotidis, E. Phoevos); 17. Computations at the interfaces in child grammar (by Radeva-Bork, Teodora); 18. Intensionality, grammar, and the sententialist hypothesis (by Hinzen, Wolfram); 19. What is and what is not problematic about the T-model (by Slioussar, Natalia); 20. Regarding the Third Factor: Arguments for a CLASH model (by Uriagereka, Juan); 21. The role of arbitrariness from a minimalist point of view (by Bierwisch, Manfred); 22. Index

Review :
These deeply informed and carefully argued papers are very welcome. Speaking personally, my viewpoint is often somewhat different, but I am delighted to have these outstanding papers as a challenge and stimulus to thought, and am confident that others concerned with the fundamental nature of language will react the same way. This excellent collection ably demonstrates how the minimalist program continues to raise exciting conceptual, technical, and empirical questions for linguistic theory. The individual papers provide detailed analyses bearing on these questions and elucidating the breadth and depth of the general pursuit of minimalist answers, now in its third decade.