Binding and Filtering

The essays collected in this book result from recent work in trace theory, the starting point being Chomsky's proposals to permit syntax to over-generate profusely and then to provide most of the significant reduction in the form of a system of filters and constraints on logical form. They all address various aspects and implications of his article, On Binding, which is reprinted here. Equally important, the essays demonstrate the applicability of Chomsky's proposals to a number of different languages.

Heny writes that "editorial work on the volume brought me to a realization of the far-reaching implications of the approach to linguistic analysis underlying Chomsky's On Binding. It constitutes a radical break with his previous work, of a very exciting and promising kind." Heny's Introduction goes on to describe the shift in Chomsky's position over the last ten years in lucid and straightforward fashion, identifying the striking new properties of this framework and making the collection generally more accessible to a wider audience.

Contents: Introduction; On Binding, Noam Chomsky; Finiteness and Boundedness in Turkish, Lelan George and Jaklin Kornfilt; Nominative Marking in Italian Infinitives and the Nominative Island Constraint, Luigi Rizzi; Empty Subjects, Case and Agreement and the Grammar of Dutch, Eric J. Reuland; Binding, Quantifiers, Clitics and Control, Richard S. Kayne; Government and Relativisation in Celtic, Stephen Harlow; Germanic Word Order and the Format of Surface Filters, Joan Maling and Annie Zaenen; Ouechua Word Structure, Pieter Muysken; Index.

Frank Heny is Professor of Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language, and Head of the Institute of General Linguistics at the University of Groningen, Holland. Distributed in North America for Croom Helm Publishers Ltd.