This book presents new work on how Merge and formal features, two basic
factors in the Minimalist Program, should determine the syntactic
computation of natural language. Merge combines simpler objects into more
complex ones. Formal features establish dependencies within objects. In
this book leading scholars examine the intricate ways in which these two
factors interact to generate well-formed derivations in natural language.
It is divided into two parts concerned with formal features and
interpretable features - a subset of formal features. The authors combine
grammatical theory with the analysis of data drawn from a wide range of
languages, both in the adult grammar and in first language acquisition. The
mechanisms at work in linguistic computation are considered in relation to
a variety of linguistic phenomena, including A-binding, A'-dependencies and
reconstruction, agreement, word order, adjuncts, pronouns and complementizers.