The Minimalist Program consists of four recent essays that attempt to situate linguistic theory in the broader cognitive sciences. In these essays the minimalist approach to linguistic theory is formulated and progressively developed. Building on the theory of principles and parameters and, in particular, on principles of economy of derivation and representation, the minimalist framework takes Universal Grammar as providing a unique computational system, with derivations driven by morphological properties, to which the syntactic variation of languages is also restricted. Within this theoretical framework, linguistic expressions are generated by optimally efficient derivations that must satisfy the conditions that hold on interface levels, the only levels of linguistic representation. The interface levels provide instructions to two types of performance systems, articulatory-perceptual and conceptual- intentional. All syntactic conditions, then, express properties of these interface levels, reflecting the interpretive requirements of language and keeping to very restricted conceptual resources. The Essays Principles and Parameters Theory. Some Notes on Economy of Derivation and Representation. A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory. Categories and Transformations in a Minimalist Framework.

Linguistic Minimalism is the most ambitious presentation and defense of the minimalist program published to date. My overall assessment is that Boeckx has done an excellent job. I recommend Linguistic Minimalism to anyone with a good background in syntactic theory who wants to know what the minimalist program is all about. Cedric Boeckx has written a book that puts the program in the best possible light.

This book is the first since 1897 to describe the earliest reconstructable stages of the prehistory of English. It outlines the grammar of Proto-Indo-European, considers the changes by which one dialect of that prehistoric language developed into Proto-Germanic, and provides a detailed account of the grammar of Proto-Germanic. The first volume in Don Ringe's A Linguistic History of English will be of central interest to all scholars and students of comparative Indo-European and Germanic linguistics, the history of English, and historical linguists. The next volume will consider the development of Proto-Germanic into Old English. Subsequent volumes will describe the attested history of English from the Old English period to the present.

Located at the intersection of sociolinguistics and Hip Hop Studies, this cutting-edge book moves around the world - spanning Africa, Asia, Australia, the Americas and the European Union - to explore Hip Hop Cultures, youth identities, the politics of language, and the simultaneous processes of globalization and localization. Focusing closely on language, these scholars of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, (Hip Hop) cultural studies, and critical pedagogies offer linguistic insights to the growing scholarship on Hip Hop Culture, while reorienting their respective fields by paying closer attention to processes of globalization and localization.

This book is the first comprehensive presentation of Functional Discourse Grammar, a new and important theory of language structure. The authors set out its nature and origins and show how it relates to contemporary linguistic theory. They demonstrate and test its explanatory power and descriptive utility against linguistic facts from over 150 languages across a wide range of linguistic families.
After a full introduction the book is divided into chapters concerned with the four levels of grammatical representation - pragmatic, semantic, morphosyntactic, and phonological - each of which has its own hierarchical structure. Functional Discourse Grammar offers a thorough account of how the use and meaning of language influence linguistic form by conditioning two levels of formulation which feed into two levels of encoding, all with their own specific characteristics. The book offers an ideal introduction to the theory and its applications in typology and description for scholars in linguistics and related fields from graduate students upwards.