Local Instability

This monograph explores some consequences of the abandonment of phrase-structure grammar in favor of a Merge-based syntax, which dispenses with the notion of 'projection.' This reduced architecture is shown to shed new light on two long-standing problems in syntactic theory: split topicalization and quantifier float are analyzed as deriving from underlying exocentric (label-less) constituents in argument or adjunct position, which necessitate symmetry-breaking displacement. The analysis developed in this work thus constitutes an important step towards a more minimal syntax.