Minimalist Investigations in Linguistic Theory

Review

As those familiar with his work have come to expect, Howard Lasnik’s studies collected here are gems of lucidity, insight, meticulous argumentation, resolution of paradox, and surprising discoveries that open new directions for inquiry. They constitute another most impressive contribution to the understanding of language.

–Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor; Professor of Linguistics, Linguistic Theory, Syntax, Semantics, Philosophy of Language, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The chapters collected here include in their original form some of Howard Lasnik’s most important ideas that have helped shape current thinking in the Minimalist Program of linguistic theory as we know it. As is typical in his other writings, each chapter exemplifies careful argumentation, clear explanation, and honest scholarship. A must-read for anyone interested in learning the craft of syntactic theorizing or keeping up to date with current thinking.

–C.-T. James Huang, Harvard University

With great insight and clarity Lasnik continues to advance our understanding of the Minimalist Program by elucidating the fruitful interaction between detailed empirical studies and fundamental theoretical concepts. This rich collection is a major resource for linguistic theory, both for what it reveals about the structure of language and as a model for linguistic analysis.

–Robert Freidin, Princeton University

With the care and clarity that he is legendary for, Howard Lasnik investigates in these essays a series of interlocking puzzles in ellipsis, verbal inflection, anaphora and quantification. He transforms these puzzles into a goldmine of evidence about the proper relationship between syntactic representations and the phonological and semantic representations they mediate..
–Kyle Johnson,University of Massachusetts at Amherst

About the Author

Howard Lasnik is Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland. For over thirty years he has played a prominent role in syntactic theorizing in the Chomskian framework from the Extended Standard Theory and Government-Binding Theory to Minimalism. His most recent publications include Minimalist Analysis (1999) and Syntactic Structures Revisted (2000) with Marcela Depiante and Arthur Stepanov.