Description: This book presents a Minimalist analysis of syntactic relations. The authors argue that certain fundamental relations such as c-command, dominance, and checking relations can be explained within a derivational approach to structure-building couched within a new and controversial level-free model of the syntactic component of the human language faculty.
Review Quotes: "This study develops a bold and intriguing hypothesis about the nature of language that reduces a wide range of empirical phenomena to a restrictive notion of pure derivation, with intriguing and highly suggestive results. It marks an important step forward in the recent efforts to show that conceptually natural principles of great generality carry us far in understanding the apparent complexity and diversity of human languages.--Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology