Minimalism, Scope, and VP Structure

Thomas Stroik advances recent work in generative grammars in this book. Bringing together Chomsky's minimalist assumptions of syntactic representation with Aoun and Li's scope theory of logical form, the author investigates what the logical form of a sentence can tell us about the base structure of verb phrases.

In considering how it is possible to determine base argument structure from logical representation, he argues that scopal relations provide the clearest view into base argument structure. Individual chapters are devoted to data from the following constructions: double-object, multiple-wh, bare-NP adverbial and psych-verb.