This volume contains selected papers concerning syntax and morphology originally presented at the 14th meeting of the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL) held in Bergamo on 21–25 August 2006. The area covered by this volume — morphology and syntax — is traditionally a central one for many scholars working in the field of diachronic linguistics. Its continued importance is shown by the continued production of numerous important monographs and studies, as the bibliographical references in the papers of this volume attest. Studies in the
field of syntax and morphology have also become wider and richer with the contribution of many recent methodological innovations – from grammaticalisation studies to textual perspectives, from pragmatics to a sociolinguistic approach – which have influenced both synchronic and diachronic studies.

Minimalist Syntax is a collection of essays that analyze major syntactic processes in a variety of languages, all unified by their perspective from within the Minimalist Program.

The Principles-and-Parameters approach to linguistic theory has triggered an enormous amount of work in comparative syntax over the last decade or so. A natural consequence of the growth in synchronic comparative work has been a renewed interest in questions of diachronic syntax, and this collection testifies to that trend. These papers focus on questions of clause structure which have become a central theme of theoretical work since the pioneering work in the late 1980s by Chomsky, Pollock, and others. The languages studied by an international roster of contributors include all the major Romance and Germanic languages. This volume is of central importance for anyone working in theoretical, comparative, or historical syntax.

Description
 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.