Syntactic Carpentry: An Emergentist Approach to Syntax
Syntactic Carpentry: An Emergentist Approach to Syntax presents a groundbreaking approach to the study of sentence formation. Building on the emergentist thesis that the structure and use of language is shaped by more basic, non-linguistic forces—rather than by an innate Universal Grammar—William O'Grady shows how the defining properties of various core syntactic phenomena (phrase structure, co-reference, control, agreement, contraction, and extraction) follow from the operation of a linear, efficiency-driven processor. This in turn leads to a compelling new view of sentence formation that subsumes syntactic theory into the theory of sentence processing, eliminating grammar in the traditional sense from the study of the language faculty.
With this text, O'Grady advances a growing body of literature on emergentist approaches to language, and situates this work in a broader picture that also includes attention to key issues in the study of language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and agrammaticism.
This book constitutes essential reading for anyone interested in syntax and its place in the larger enterprise of cognitive science.
The primary objective of this book is to advance the emergentist thesis by applying it to a difficult and important set of problems that arise in the syntax of natural language. The particular idea that I explore is that the defining properties of many important syntactic phenomena arise from the operation of a general efficiency-driven processor rather than from autonomous grammatical principles. As I will try to explain in much more detail in the pages that follow, this sort of approach points toward a possible reduction of the theory of sentence structure to the theory of sentence processing.

In The Name Of Terrorism
No book like this could have been written without the generous assistance of the staffs of Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and the George Bush Presidential Library. Going far beyond providing normal access to internal documents, the staffs of these libraries helped me puzzle through various issues that crossed the administrations covered in this book.

My ability to complete the manuscript was possible due to the professional  leave, the travel support to the various libraries, and the graduate research supportthat I received from Ahmed Abdelal, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgia State University. I am particularly grateful to Mary Ann Romski and Carolyn Codamo, who assumed the Georgia State Department of Communication chair duties in my absence. The patient administrative hand of Dean Lauren Adamson allowed me complete final revisions. Many colleagues have contributed thoughtful comments in an effort to improve this book. My initial interest in terrorism was spawned when I was conducting research for Dr. Chuck Kaufman at the University of Maryland.

More recently, Mary Stuckey offered not only expert editorial commentary, but  knowledge of resources from allied professional disciplines that spoke to themesof the manuscript. Other important commentaries were provided by Marilyn Young, Celeste Condit, Karlyn Campbell, James Darsey, Thomas Goodnight, David Cheshier, Robert Newman, Cori Dauber, and Gordon Mitchell. I am also grateful for the comments from the anonymous reviewers of SUNY Press who provided detailed commentary throughout the manuscript, the watchful eyes of my copyeditor, Wyatt Benner, production editor Diane Ganeles, production assistant Ryan Hacker, and the assistance of Michael Rinella, who shepherded me through the first part of the publication process at SUNY Press.