Localityis a key concept not only in linguistic theorizing, but in explaining pattern of acquisition and patterns of recovery in garden path sentences, as well. If syntax relates sound and meaning over an infinite domain, syntactic dependencies and operations must be restricted in such a way to apply over limited, finite domains in order to be detectable at all (although of course they may be allowed to iterate indefinitely). The theory of what these finite domains are and how they relate to the fundamentally unbounded nature of syntax is the theory of locality.
The papers in this collection all deal with the concept of locality in syntactic theory, and, more specifically, describe and analyze the various contributions Luigi Rizzi has made to this area over the past three and a half decades. The authors are all eminent linguists in generative syntax who have collaborated with Rizzi closely, and in eleven chapters, they explore locality in both pure syntax and psycholinguistics. This collection is essential reading for students and scholars of linguistic theory, generative syntax, and comparative syntax.
Contents 1. Locality: An introduction Enoch O. Aboh, Maria-Teresa Guasti, and Ian Robert 2. Locality and Agreement in French Hyper-Complex Inversion Richard S. Kayne and Jean-Yves Pollock 3. Subject Positions, Subject Extraction, EPP, and the Subject Criterion Ur Shlonsky 4. Extraction from DP in Italian revisited Guglielmo Cinque 5. French Reflexive se: Binding and Merge Locality Dominique Sportiche 6. Locality in restructuring: On weak wh-elements, and the IP-internal left-periphery Anna Cardinaletti 7. DE-infinitives as complements to Romanian nouns Virginia Hill 8. Locality and the distribution of main clause phenomena Liliane Haegeman 9. Locality and interference in the formation of object questions: a grammar through processing view Maria Teresa Guasti 10. The Left Perl‰