Ever since Chomsky's Barriers, functional heads have been the privileged object of research in generative linguistics. But over the last two decades, two rival approaches have developed. The cartographic project, as represented by the collections in this Oxford series, considers evidence for a functional head in one language as evidence for it in universal grammar. On the other hand, minimalist accounts tend to consider structural economy as literally involving as few heads as possible. In the present 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 such as grammaticalization and language change, standard and non-standard varieties, interface issues, and morphosyntax. Functional Heads attempts to map aspects of syntactic structure following the cartographic approach, and in doing so demonstrate that the differences between the cartographic approach and the minimalist approach are more apparent than substantial.

Table of Contents:
Introduction, The editors ; Section 1: On the cartography of functional structure ; From modal particle to interrogative marker: A study of German denn, Josef Bayer ; Lexical complementizers and headless relatives, Paola Beninca ; The theory of syntax and the representation of indexicality, Alessandra Giorgi ; Wh-Movement as topic movement, Gunther Grewendorf ; 'Je est un autre.' Subject positions, point of view and the neuter pronoun tet in West Flemish, Jacqueline Gueron and Liliane Haegeman ; Number within the DP: A view from Oceanic, Elisabeth Pearce ; Mirative and focusing uses of the Catalan particle pla, Gemma Rigau ; On the nature of the V2 system in Medieval Romance, Giampaolo Salvi ; A note on the Spanish Left Periphery, Maria Luisa Zubizarreta ; Section 2: On movements and constraints ; Moving verbal chunks in the low functional field, Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi ; Articles as partitives, Ignacio Bosque and M. Carme Picallo ; Toward an analysis of French Hyper-Complex Inversion, Richard S. Kayne and Jean-Yves Pollock ; Samoan ergativity as double passives, Hilda Koopman ; Rivisiting "Suspended Affixation" and other coordinate mysteries, Jaklin Kornfilt ; Backward Binding and the C-T phase: A case of Syntactic Haplology, Christer Platzack ; On the feature composition of participial light verbs in French, Andrew Radford and Michele Vincent ; A note on dative incompatibility suppression, Henk van Riemsdijk ; Hallmarks on Portuguese syntax, Alain Rouveret ; Notes on wh in situ in French, Ur Shlonsky ; Re re again. What French re shows about VP structures, have and be raising, and the syntax/phonology interface, Dominique Sportiche ; The structural object position of verbs and nouns, Knut Tarald Taraldsen ; Section 3: On the nature of functional heads ; On the double definiteness, aspect, and word order in Old and Modern Scandinavian, Werner Abraham ; The order of verbal affixes and functional structure in Imbabura Quichua, Peter Cole and Gabriella Hermon ; Number as a Feature, Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin ; Which is the extended projection above N?, Joseph Emonds ; On the lexical-functional divide: The case of negation, M. Rita Manzini and Leonardo M. Savoia ; Diachrony and cartography: Paths of grammaticalisation and the clausal hierarchy, Ian Roberts ; Silent Heads, Halldor Armann Sigurdsson and Joan Maling ; Postnominal adjectives in Greek indefinite noun phrases, Melita Stavrou ; Afterword, Giulio Lepschy and Lorenzo Renzi