Understanding Minimalism Preface

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Norbert Hornstein, Jairo Nunes, and Kleanthes K. Grohmann. 2005. Understanding Minimalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

May 2005

Preface

One problem students face in “getting into” Minimalism is the difficulty in seeing how the specific proposals advanced reflect the larger programmatic concerns. This book is our attempt to show why Minimalism is an exciting research program and to explain how the larger issues that motivate the program get translated into specific technical proposals. We believe that a good way of helping novices grasp both the details and the whole picture is to introduce facets of the Minimalist Program against a GB-background. In particular, we show how minimalist considerations motivate rethinking and replacing GB-assumptions and technical machinery. This allows us to construct the new minimalist future in the bowels of the older GB-world and gives the uninitiated some traction for the exhausting work of getting to a minimalist plane by leveraging their efforts with more familiar GB-bootstraps. In the end, we are confident that the reader will have a pretty good picture of what minimalism is and how (and why) it came about and should be well equipped to pursue minimalist explorations him- or herself. Given this pedagogical approach, this book has an intended audience. Although it does not presuppose any familiarity with minimalism, it is written for those who already have a background in linguistics and syntax. This ideal reader has taken a course in GB and this is an introduction to minimalism for such a person; it is not an intro to syntax nor an intro to linguistics. Before we embark on our various minimalist voyages, we summarize the main GB-assumptions and technical apparatus of concern. These summaries are intended to help the reader remember relevant GB-background material and to provide pointers for where to look for further readings. We stress that these GB-sections are summaries. They are not full elaborations of even standard GB-positions. If the reader hasn’t taken a course in GB, it would be very useful to track down these pointers and become comfortable with the relevant background material. Although the first two authors wrote the bulk of the book, each chapter was thoroughly checked by the third author, who made valuable refinements and improvements, took care of the notes and references, and ensured internal coherence within and among chapters.

The three of us are extremely grateful to all the people who read (parts of) the manuscript, gave us feedback, helped us with data, and tested some of the chapters in their classes. Special thanks to Marina Augusto, Christopher Becker, Cedric Boeckx, Željko Bošković, Noam Chomsky, Norbert Corver, Marcel den Dikken, Ricardo Etxepare, Koldo Garai, Kay Gonzalez, Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Jiro Inaba, Mary Kato, Winnie Lechner, Jürgen Lenerz, Anikó Lipták, Horst Lohnstein, Ruth Lopes, Eric Mathieu, Jason Merchant, Rafael Nonato, Masayuki Oishi, Jamal Ouhalla, Phoevos Panagiotidis, Eduardo Raposo, Martin Reitbauer, Henk van Riemsdijk, Ian Roberts, Anna Roussou, Ed Rubin, Joachim Sabel, Raquel Santos, Usama Soltan, Volker Struckmeier, Joy Trombley, Juan Uriagereka, Amy Weinberg, an anonymous reviewer, Elena Shelkovaya-Vasiliou for valuable help with the index, Jacqueline French for wonderful copy-editing, Dora Alexopoulou for safe delivery, and our editor at CUP, Andrew Winnard. We would also like to thank the students at the institutions where we taught the materials of the book for their invaluable feedback: Michigan State University in East Lansing (LSA Summer Institute), Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana, Universidade de São Paulo, Universität zu Köln, Universität Stuttgart, University of Cyprus in Nicosia, and University of Maryland at College Park. The second author would also like to acknowledge the support he received from Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa (grant 300897/96-0) and the Cátedra de Estudos Brasileiros of the University of Leiden while he was writing the book.

NH JN KKG

College Park São Paulo Nicosia May 2005

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