Peripheries: Syntactic Edges and their Effects (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 59)

The syntactic periphery has become one of the most important areas of research in syntactic theory in recent years, due to the emergence of new research programmes initiated by Rizzi, Kayne and Chomsky. However research has concentrated on the empirical nature of clausal peripheries. The purpose of this volume is to explore the question of whether the notion of periphery has any real theoretical bite. An important consensus emerging from the volume is that the edges of certain syntactic expressions appear to be the locus of the connection between phrase structure, prosody, and information structure. This volume contains 16 papers by researchers in this area.

The book:
- contains an extensive introduction setting out the research questions addressed and setting the contributions in an overall theoretical context,
- has a distinct comparative slant,
- brings together work from a range of theoretical perspectives, while maintaining a unity of purpose,
- could serve as the basis for a graduate course on peripheral positions,
- contains papers addressing:
= the question of the fine-grainedness of syntactic representations,
= the relevance of syntactic edges to locality and semantic interpretation,
= the nature of the dependencies connecting peripheral elements to the syntactic core. Audience: Academics and graduate students interested in syntax and its interfaces with semantics and prosody, acquisition of syntax, cross-linguistic comparison.

From the reviews:

"This book contains 15 papers presented at a conference on peripheral positions at the University of York in September 2000 a ] . This is a generally excellent volume, managing to fit a bumper number of papers inside its deceptively slim covers. a ] overall the standard of the papers is very high. The range of phenomena discussed is impressive as is the theoretical diversity within the papers." (Jonny Butler, The Linguist List, August, 2004)