Reviewed by Tommi Leung, United Arab Emirates University

This volume explores recent developments in Thomas S. Stroik’s Survive-minimalism (SM) version of the minimalist program and John Frampton and Sam Gutmann’s view that syntax is crash-proof. Part 1 ‘Introduction’ contains two articles describing the basic tenets of SM. Michael T. Putnam and Thomas Stroik’s ‘Traveling without moving: The conceptual necessity of Survive-minimalism’ illustrates the mechanism of SM: derivation is defined by active features in Numeration. Syntax consists of Merge, Survive, and Remerge. Survive signals additional active features, whereas Remerge checks off all remaining active features. Derivation terminates if no active features remain. Thomas Stroik’s ‘The numeration in Survive-minimalism’ discusses Numeration and claims that it is not a lexical array before computation. Instead Numeration is built up step-by-step and becomes the domain for Merge and Remerge.

Part 2 ‘Studies of movement phenomena and structure building in Survive-minimalism’ examines the SM analysis of syntactic movement. Omer Preminger’s ‘Long-distance agreement without Probe-Goal relations’ accounts for English, Hindi-Urdu, and Basque long-distance agreement. He analyzes long-distance agreement as syntactic movement in which the phonological component interprets the moved element at the lower position of the movement chain. Gema Chocano’s ‘Musings on the left periphery in West Germanic: German left dislocation and “survive”’ adopts SM in the analysis of German left dislocation in the absence of EPP-feature. Instead, Merge of the D-pronoun and the left-dislocated XP with C is triggered by the presence of a [+Ref] feature.

Kristin M. Eide’s ‘Tense, finiteness and the survive principle: Temporal chains in a crash-proof grammar’ describes temporal and referential chains as conceptually parallel and analyzes both with SM. Michael T. Putnam and M. Carmen Parafita Couto’s ‘When grammars collide: Code-switching in Survive-minimalism’ analyzes Spanish-German code-switching by optimality-theoretic constraints that filter the selection possibilities of determiners in the two grammars. John R. te Velde’s ‘Using the Survive principle for deriving coordinate (a)symmetries’ points out that Chomsky’s phase-based theory has problems analyzing coordinate structures: that is, lexical array is selected before Merge, which results in the failure of matching prior to Merge. Alternatively, Select as defined by SM introduces lexical items to algorithms that map particular features from the leading conjunct onto the next conjunct.

Part 3 ‘Covert and non-movement operations in Survive-minimalism’ explores how other non-movement observations receive a novel analysis in SM. Gregory M. Kobele’s ‘Syntactic identity in Survive-minimalism: Ellipsis and the derivational identity hypothesis’ examines how the derivational identity hypothesis works in tandem with SM. Winfried Lechner’s ‘Evidence for Survive from covert movement’ interprets the particular mechanism of SM as involving push-chains that trigger movement and resolve incompatibility at the semantic component. He investigates multiple covert movements and concludes that SM provides a better account of the ordering restrictions between different types of movements. Elly van Gelderen’s ‘Language change and survive: Feature economy in the numeration’ investigates how grammaticalization sheds lights on the reanalysis of features of lexical items. She concludes that contrary to the basic assumption of SM, uninterpretable features are necessary.