Jean-Roger Vergnaud’s work on the foundational issues in linguistics has proved influential over the past three decades. At MIT in 1974, Vergnaud (now holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in Humanities at the University of Southern California) made a proposal in his PhD thesis that has since become, in somewhat modified form, the standard analysis for the derivation of relative clauses. He later integrated the proposal within a broader theory of movement and abstract case. These topics have remained central to theoretical linguistics. This book attests to the importance of Vergnaud’s c ... More

Jean-Roger Vergnaud’s work on the foundational issues in linguistics has proved influential over the past three decades. At MIT in 1974, Vergnaud (now holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in Humanities at the University of Southern California) made a proposal in his PhD thesis that has since become, in somewhat modified form, the standard analysis for the derivation of relative clauses. He later integrated the proposal within a broader theory of movement and abstract case. These topics have remained central to theoretical linguistics. This book attests to the importance of Vergnaud’s contributions to linguistics. The chapters first discuss issues in syntax, documenting important breakthroughs in the development of the principles and parameters framework and including a famous letter (unpublished until recently) from Vergnaud to Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik commenting on the first draft of their 1977 paper “Filters and Controls.” Vergnaud’s writings on phonology (which, the editors write, “take a definite syntactic turn”) have also been influential, and the book concludes with two contributions to that field. The chapters, rewarding from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, not only offer insight into Vergnaud’s impact on the field but also describe current work on the issues he introduced into the scholarly debate.