This volume contains twelve chapters on the derivation of and the correlates to verb initial word order. The studies in this volume cover such widely divergent languages as Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Old Irish, Biblical Hebrew, Jakaltek, Mam, Lummi (Straits Salish), Niuean, Malagasy, Palauan, K'echi', and Zapotec, from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives, including Minimalism, information structure, and sentence processing. The first book to take a crosslinguistic comparative approach to verb initial syntax, this volume provides new data to some old problems and debates and explores some innovative approaches to the derivation of verb initial order.

"The editors' introduction of the book presents a fairly detailed overview of nearly all the existing derivational approaches that have been proposed for verb-initial languages. This chapter is very valuable for those who want to get a thorough orientation on the subject. The book contributes to the linguistic community at large, as it shows a variety of verb-initial languages and different approaches to the problem. It also contributes to the research of Universal Grammar as it tests and verifies different approaches to the derivation of verb-initial languages." --SIL Electronic Book Reviews

Andrew Carnie is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona. Eithne Guilfoyle is Head of Humanities at the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art Design and Technology.