Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the coalition of two independently working biolinguistic research groups, one Kyoto-Tokyo-based and one Barcelona-based, led by one of the coeditors, respectively. Hiroki Narita and Naoki Fukui introduces the notion of feature-equilibrium to capture some interesting properties of syntactic computation, while Takaomi Kato, Hiroki Narita, Hironobu Kasai, Mihoko Zushi and Naoki Fukui proposes to decompose Merge further into two more basic operations which they call 0-Search and 0-Merge. Mihoko Zushi's work corroborates Kato et al's proposal by showing that Case valuation, a representative aspect of uniquely human syntax which was once explained in terms of highly domain-specific analytical apparatus, now directly follows from a single computational operation. Koji Sugisaki addresses the issue of structure dependence, arguably the most prominent feature of human language in the biological world.