Introduction

This volume is a collection of articles I have written over the years concerning linguistic theory and comparative syntax. The study of the principles of Universal Grammar (UG), as they have been discovered in the tradition of modern generative grammar, has always been the major object of my research. Given the diversity of natural languages, however, the discovery of the principles of UG cannot be the sole object of inquiry in linguistic theory, a situation which makes the field more challenging and even more interesting, at least to me, than, say, arithmetic or physics. Thus, comparative syntax comes into play. Comparative syntax is concerned with the properties of languages that are not universal, and it attempts to discover “natural classes” of syntactic properties that can be traced back to a single (usually quite abstract) parameter that yields observed differences among target languages. In the principles-and-parameters model assumed throughout the whole book, the study of comparative syntax proceeds hand in hand with the study of general principles of UG that interact with language-specific parameters to induce observed variation. All of the essays contained in this volume deal with comparative syntax as it pertains to the study of invariant principles of UG, with a special focus on the in-depth comparative analyses of English (-type languages) and Japanese (-type languages).