Locality (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax)

Locality is a key concept not only in linguistic theorizing, but in explaining pattern of acquisition and patterns of recovery in garden path sentences, as well. If syntax relates sound and meaning over an infinite domain, syntactic dependencies and operations must be restricted in such a way to apply over limited, finite domains in order to be detectable at all (although of course they may be allowed to iterate indefinitely). The theory of what these finite domains are and how they relate to the fundamentally unbounded nature of syntax is the theory of locality.

The papers in this collection all deal with the concept of locality in syntactic theory, and, more specifically, describe and analyze the various contributions Luigi Rizzi has made to this area over the past three and a half decades. The authors are all eminent linguists in generative syntax who have collaborated with Rizzi closely, and in eleven chapters, they explore locality in both pure syntax and psycholinguistics. This collection is essential reading for students and scholars of linguistic theory, generative syntax, and comparative syntax.

Enoch Oladé Aboh is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, where he holds a chair entitled: The Learnability of Human Languages. His research interests include issues of learnability in human language with a special focus on theoretical syntax; comparative syntax; discourse-syntax interface; and language creation and language change.

Maria Teresa Guasti is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Her research spans theoretical linguistics, language acquisition, and developmental language impairment. She is Associate Investigator at the CCD, Maquarie University, and Visiting Professor at the International Centre for Child Health, Beijing.

Ian Roberts is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. He has held previous positions at Universität Stuttgart, the University of Wales, and Université de Genève. His research interests include comparative and diachronic syntax and syntactic theory. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Academia Europaea.