This important contribution to the Minimalist Program offers a comprehensive theory of locality and new insights into phrase structure and syntactic cartography. It unifies central components of the grammar and increases the symmetry in syntax. Its central hypothesis has broad empirical application and at the same time reinforces the central premise of minimalism that language is an optimal system.

Cedric Boeckx focuses on two core components of grammar: phrase structure and locality. He argues that the domains which render syntactic processes local (such as islands, bounding nodes, barriers, and phases in all their cartographic manifestations) are better understood once reduced to, or combined with, the basic syntactic operation, Merge, and its core representation, the X-bar schema. In a detailed examination of the mechanism of phrasal projection or labelling he shows that viewing chains as X-bar phrases allows conditions on chain formation or movement to be captured.

Clearly argued, accessibly written, and illustrated with examples from a wide range of languages, Bare Syntax will appeal to linguists and others interested in syntactic theory at graduate level and above.

The Government and Binding Theory (GB), though Chomsky prefers it to be called the Principle and Parameter Theory, is the most popular version of Chomsky's grammar in 1980s'. This book is an easy reading to cover every important part of GB. All significant terms are highlighted in a shaded block, which is very convenient for the reader to check up. In particular, the last chapter of the book provides a brief but clear explanation for the current version of Chomsky's theory, i.e., the Minimalist Program (MP). The chapter is a good help for the reader who want to transit from GB to MP, though he would be quite surprising to see that almost all key concepts in GB, such as D-structure, S-structure, Government, disappear in MP. This is a good introductory book both about the GB and MP framework.

This slim volume, first published in 1957 and occasionally reprinted since then, has attracted surprisingly little attention in linguistic circles. It is unfortunate that this is the case, for in the book Chomsky proposes a truly innovative approach to syntactic problems which have plagued linguists since the days of Bloomfield. Essentially, Chomsky proposes that actual utterances should be understood as surface structures which have been derived from more basic deep structures by means of transformations.

From the review by Robert E. Lee

This abridged version of Radford's Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the Structure of English offers a concise, accessible introduction to current syntactic theory, drawing on the key concepts of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. Assuming little or no prior grammatical knowledge, it leads students through a range of topics in English syntax, beginning at
an elementary level and progressing in stages towards more advanced material. An extensive glossary is included and each chapter contains a workbook section with "helpful hints", exercises, and model answers, suitable for class discussion and self-study.

An Introduction to English Syntax discusses the central concepts of syntax which are applied in a wide range of university courses, in business, in teaching and in speech therapy. The book deals with traditional concepts which have been greatly refined and extended over the past thirty years: what nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are and how they can be recognized; what a subordinate clause is and how different types of subordinate clauses can be recognized; what subjects and objects are. The book draws out the connections between syntax and meaning; in particular, two chapters focus on topics such as tense, mood and voice which are central to the use of language and are of major importance in second language learning.