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This book represents the culmination of five years’ work in which I have tried to fundamentally rethink the minimalist approach to argument structure, while at the same time pulling together a number of different strands in the literature and shaping them into a unified theory. Certain elements of the theory proposed here were present in embryonic form in my 1973 doctoral dissertation, but full justification for such an approach had to wait for developments in syntactic theory that took place over the next thirty years. In many ways the theory is a natural extension of three leading ideas in the literature: (i) the minimalist approach to Case theory, in particular Chomsky’s (2001) idea that Case is assigned under the Agree relation; (ii) the idea of introducing arguments in specifiers of functional categories rather than in projections of lexical categories; (iii) the neo-Davidsonian approach to argument structure represented in the work of Parsons (1990) and others. However, I believe that the way these elements are combined here, together with certain specific assumptions—notably, the idea that the initial order of Merge of the three basic argument categories Agent, Theme, and Affectee is just the opposite of that which has been almost universally assumed in the literature—lead to a radically new approach to argument structure that has the potential to unify data from a wide range of different language types in terms of a simple and universal syntactic structure.
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