Functional Heads, Volume 7

Book excerpt: Over the last two decades, functional heads have been one of the privileged objects of research in generative linguistics. However, within this line of inquiry, two alternative approaches have developed: while the cartographic project considers crosslinguistic evidence as crucial for a complete mapping of functional heads in universal grammar, minimalist accounts tend to consider structural economy as literally involving a reduction in the number of available heads. In this volume, some of the most influential linguists who have participated in this long-lasting debate offer their recent work in short, self-contained case studies. The contributions cover all the main layers of recently studied syntactic structure, including such major areas of empirical research as grammaticalization and language change, standard and non-standard varieties, interface issues, and morphosyntax. Functional Heads attempts to map aspects of syntactic structure according to the cartographic approach, and in doing so demonstrates that the differences between cartography and minimalism are perhaps more superficial than substantial.