Minimalism, Scope, and VP Structure

Thomas Stroik advances recent work in generative grammars in this book. Bringing together Chomsky′s minimalist assumptions of syntactic representation with Aoun and Li′s scope theory of logical form, the author investigates what the logical form of a sentence can tell us about the base structure of verb phrases.

In considering how it is possible to determine base argument structure from logical representation, he argues that scopal relations provide the clearest view into base argument structure. Individual chapters are devoted to data from the following constructions: double-object, multiple-wh, bare-NP adverbial and psych-verb.

The book is very well organized. It argues for a particular shape of the VP and manages to do that consistently and tightly. It pulls together lots of data on the structure of the VP and on adverbials. This book would be very useful for graduate courses on wh-movement, argument-structure, and the structure of VP or any that combine these topics. --Elly van Gelderen, Department of English, Arizona State University In this scholarly book, author Thomas Stroik furthers recent directions in generative grammars. Bringing together Chomsky′s minimalist assumptions of syntactic representation with Aoun and Li′s theory of scope, Stroik investigates what the logical representation of a sentence can tell us about the structure of verb phrases (VPs). Claiming that scopal relations provide the clearest view of the structural relationship between noun phrase (NP) arguments, he uses scopal data to explore and expose the base argument structure of VPs. In his analysis of VP structure, Stroik discusses double-object constructions, multiple interrogatives, bare NP adverbials, and psych-verb constructions. Minimalism, Scope, and VP Structure will interest researchers, scholars, and advanced students in linguistic theory and is suitable for advanced courses in linguistics and syntax.