Dependency and Directionality

An integrated understanding of structure building, movement and locality couched in a syntactic theory constructing trees from the top down.

This volume breaks new ground in syntax by arguing for a 'top-down' approach to syntactic structures, and the locality restrictions on filler-gap dependencies. Written by a leading scholar in theoretical linguistics, it represents the first book-length study on the subject and paves the way for important future research.The direction in which the structure of sentences and filler-gap dependencies are built is a topic of fundamental importance to linguistic theory and its applications. This book develops an integrated understanding of structure building, movement and locality embedded in a syntactic theory that argues for a 'top down' approach, presenting an explicit counterweight to the bottom-up derivations pervading the Chomskian mainstream. It combines a compact and comprehensive historical perspective on structure building, the cycle, and movement, with detailed discussions of island effects, the typology of long-distance filler-gap dependencies, and the special problems posed by the subject in clausal syntax. Providing introductions to the main issues, reviewing extant arguments for bottom-up and top-down approaches, and presenting several case studies in its development of a new theory, this book should be of interest to all students and scholars of language interested in syntactic structures and the dependencies inside them.