Description: This book examines the nature, creation, and comprehension of constructions in which words that go together in meaning occur arbitrarily far away from each other. It provides a detailed survey of the factors responsible for their creation and comprehension, alongside new experimental evidence and suggestions for future research.
Review Quotes: "The fact that Chaves and Putnam are both arguing for certain positions and setting out a research programme makes this a work of considerable importance [...] If the book has the impact that it deserves, syntactic research will come to look rather different. Put simply, there will be more work aiming to develop analyses that can be incorporated into models of language use and more work utilizing appropriate experiments to disentangle the sources of speakers' judgements. It will be an important and very welcome change, perhaps even paradigm shift." -- Robert D. Borsley, Journal of Linguistics
"In a real tour de force, Chaves and Putnam examine a wide range of unbounded dependency constructions, including some rarely noted ones, and bring to bear on them the perspectives of all the major theories of syntax, as well as language processing and language acquisition. This book should be studied by syntacticians and psycholinguists of all persuasions." -- Ray Jackendoff, Tufts University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology