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Normally, a speaker uses a first person singular pronoun (in English, I, me, mine, myself) to refer to himself or herself. To refer to a single addressee, a speaker uses second person pronouns (you, yours, yourself). But sometimes third person nonpronominal determiner phrases (DPs) are used to refer to the speaker—for example, this reporter, yours truly, or to the addressee: my lord, the baroness, Madam (Is Madam not feeling well?). This book refers to these DPs as imposters because their third person exterior hides a first or second person core. It studies the interactions of imposters with a range of grammatical phenomena, including pronominal agreement, coordinate structures, Principle C phenomena, epithets, fake indexicals, and a property of pronominal agreement it calls homogeneity. The chapters conclude that traditional ideas about pronominal features (person, number, gender), which countenance only agreement with an antecedent or the relation of the pronoun to its referent, are much too simple. They sketch elements of a more sophisticated view and argue for its relevance and explanatory power in several data realms. The fundamental proposal of the book is that a pronoun agrees with what the book calls a source, where its antecedent constitutes only one type of source. It argues that the study of imposters (and closely related camouflage DPs) has far-reaching consequences that are inconsistent with many current theories of anaphora.

This reanalysis of minimalist syntax considers the optimal design properties for human language. Taking as its starting point Noam Chomsky’s minimalist assumption that the syntactic component of a language generates representations for sentences that are interpreted at perceptual and conceptual interfaces, the book investigates how these representations can be generated most parsimoniously. Countering the prevailing analyses of minimalist syntax, it argues that the computational properties of human language consist only of strictly local Merge operations that lack both look-back and look-forward properties. All grammatical operations reduce to a single sort of locally defined feature-checking operation, and all grammatical properties are the cumulative effects of local grammatical operations. As the book demonstrates, reducing syntactic operations to local operations with a single property—merging lexical material into syntactic derivations—not only radically increases the computational efficiency of the syntactic component, but also optimally simplifies the design of the computational system. The book explains a range of syntactic phenomena that have long resisted previous generative theories, including that-trace effects, superiority effects, and the interpretations available for multiple-wh constructions. It also introduces the Survive Principle, an important new concept for syntactic analysis, and provides something considered impossible in minimalist syntax: a locality account of displacement phenomena.

This book explains the usefulness of game theory in thinking about a wide range of issues in linguistics. It argues that we use grammar strategically to signal our intended meanings: our choices as speaker are conditioned by what choices the hearer will make interpreting what we say. Game theory—according to which the outcome of a decision depends on the choices of others—provides a formal system that allows us to develop theories about the kind of decision making that is crucial to understanding linguistic behavior. The book argues the only way to understand meaning is to grapple with its social nature—that it is the social that gives content to our mental lives. Game theory gives us a framework for working out these ideas. The resulting theory of use will allow us to account for many aspects of linguistic meaning, and the grammar itself can be simplified. The results are nevertheless precise and subject to empirical testing. The book offers an introduction to game theory and the study of linguistic meaning. The book includes an extended argument in favor of the social basis of meaning; a brief introduction to game theory, with a focus on coordination games and cooperation; discussions of common knowledge and games of partial information; models of games for pronouns and politeness; and the development of a system of social coordination of reference.

This wide-ranging book examines where the conditions of binding theory apply and in doing so considers the nature of phrase structure (in particular how case and theta roles apply) and the nature of the lexical/functional split. It begins with a revised formulation of binding theory. The book reexamines Chomsky’s conjecture that all conditions apply at the interfaces, in particular LF (or Logical Form), and argues instead that all negative conditions, in particular Condition C, apply continuously throughout the derivation. He draws a distinction between positive and negative conditions, which have different privileges of occurrence according to the architecture of the grammar. Negative conditions, the book finds, apply homogeneously throughout the derivation; positive conditions apply solely at LF. A hole in Condition C then forces a reconsideration of the whole architecture of the grammar. The book finds that case and theta representations are split apart and are only fused at later points in the derivation, after movement has applied. This exploration of the relationship between case and theta theory reveals a relationship of greater subtlety and importance than is generally assumed.