In an era of ever-increasing specialization in linguistic theory, researchers and students alike are in need of reference work

In an era of ever-increasing specialization in linguistic theory, researchers and students alike are in need of reference works presenting the latest developments accurately. The Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory (henceforth: ‘Handbook’) fills this gap by offering its readers an impressive collection of twenty-three contributions on a wide variety of syntactic topics. Written primarily with a Minimalist/GB orientation, the Handbook is divided into an introduction and six sections, each focusing on a specific area of generative syntactic inquiry: ‘Derivation versus Representation’, ‘Movement’, ‘Argument Structure and Phrase Structure’, ‘Functional Projections’, ‘Interface with Interpretation’, and ‘External Evaluation of Syntax’. The Handbook begins with an introduction by Baltin and Collins whose aim is to provide an overview ‘of what syntax looks like today’ (5). They discuss how restrictions on the formation of constituent questions noted by Chomsky in the 1960s triggered a large body of research on constraints on various grammatical processes. Mention of syntactic restrictions brings the editors to compare the discovery procedures of preChomksyan structuralist linguistics with those of syntactic research since the 1960s. In particular, they discuss the importance of introspective data and their incorporation into implicit discovery procedures to arrive at a theory of Universal Grammar. The role of Universal Grammar vis-à-vis the architecture of syntactic theory leads B & C to ‘assume that grammatical rules operate in the simplest, least-specified manner possible’ (2). Referring to Chomsky again, the editors point out that the advantage of ‘the idea that a grammar is a formal theory, with mentalistic embodiment, we can ask precise, testable questions about the nature of some very interesting things, such as the human mind, in a way that would have been meaningless even in the late 1930s’ (5). Part I, titled ‘Derivation versus Representation’, begins with a chapter on ‘Explaining Morphosyntactic Competition’ by Joan Bresnan. Combining ideas from Optimality Theory and Lexical-Functional Grammar, B analyzes different patterns of negation in various English dialects. In the first half of the chapter, she reviews how blocking effects can be modeled in OT, and discusses the nature of sentential and constituent negation in various English dialects. In the second half, B develops an elegant OT account that explains the distribution of negation in inverted position in terms of a number of competing constraints, which lead to the blocking of a morphological construction by a syntactic construction. In the chapter that follows, ‘Economy Conditions in Syntax’, Chris Collins discusses how different types of economy conditions proposed within the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) are related to each other. Following a number of theoryinternal assumptions regarding the nature of syntax, C looks in detail at a number of minimalist principles called Last Resort, Inertness, Minimality, Fewest Morphemes, Shortest Derivation Requirement, As Soon As Possible, and Procrastinate. While these economy conditions are of great relevance to the current state of Chomskyan linguistics, it is not entirely clear how they might be significant for non-minimalist theories of