Derivations and Evaluations offers a cross-linguistic study of the syntactic behavior of subjects and complementizers. Special attention is paid to the syntactic theory that should explain this behavior. The author develops an optimality-theoretic model of the syntax which focuses not only on the evaluation, but also on the derivation of sentences. This model provides the theoretical base for analyses of syntactic phenomena ranging from pronunciation patterns in the left-periphery of the relative clause to French Stylistic Inversion. A leitmotif is the idea that the absence of otherwise present functional structure can be held responsible for syntactic markedness. This leads, among other things, to a uniform economy account of subject-object asymmetries.
This study is of interest to a general syntactic readership.
