Merging Features: Computation, Interpretation, and Acquisition (Oxford Linguistics)

This book presents new work on how Merge and formal features, two basic factors in the Minimalist Program, should determine the syntactic computation of natural language. Merge combines simpler objects into more complex ones. Formal features establish dependencies within objects. In this book leading scholars examine the intricate ways in which these two factors interact to generate well-formed derivations in natural language. It is divided into two parts concerned with formal features and interpretable features - a subset of formal features. The authors combine grammatical theory with the analysis of data drawn from a wide range of languages, both in the adult grammar and in first language acquisition. The mechanisms at work in linguistic computation are considered in relation to a variety of linguistic phenomena, including A-binding, A'-dependencies and reconstruction, agreement, word order, adjuncts, pronouns and complementizers.

José M. Brucart is Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and has published extensively on the Spanish grammar. He is author of La sintaxis (with M.L. Hernanz) and La elipsis. Aspectos de la elisión sintáctica en español and has also contributed to the main reference grammars of Spanish and Catalan.
Anna Gavarró obtained her PhD at the University of Edinburgh and icurrently lectures on linguistics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She has published mostly on Romance and her work includes articles in Language Acquisition, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, and Brain and Language, and a chapter in the reference grammar of Catalan.
Jaume Solà has been an associate professor of Catalan Philology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona since 1996. His main research interests are inflection and word order (as two crucial aspects of language variation), within the Principles and Parameters-Minimalism framework. He is editor-in-chief of Catalan Journal of Linguistics.