There is a long tradition in syntax textbooks whereby the early sections (or chapters) present a particular ‘take’ on the key properties of human language (e.g., its unboundedness, the fact that speakers can pass intuitive and more or less definitive judgments on the well-formedness as stand-alone sentences of arbitrary strings of words, and so on), followed by an overview of fundamental data structure that are said to best capture these properties, followed by a series of chapters applying those data structures to a range of natural language data. Along the way, technical refinements are introduced, attempts are made to formalize the often informal statements of descriptive machinery given at the outset to jump-start the discussion, and the discussion increasingly becomes focused on the content of the theoretical framework, with natural language data used as points of departure for exploring that content. Every such framework seems to have its own ‘set piece’ examples which demonstrate its explanatory reach, its ability to capture apparently profound generalizations with a minimal number of additional assumptions. The virtues of this narrative organization are obvious: the point of any science is to capture the behavior of its objects of interest as parsimoniously as possible, which in turn requires an analytic toolkit to capture the generalizations that represent that science's discoveries about its domain of inquiry. In order to say anything useful about that domain, students must first acquire a basic working familiarity with those conceptual tools by applying them to simpler phenomena (typically using optimally simple or idealized data sets) and progressively refine and expand their mastery of the framework by tackling increasingly challenging or even open-ended problems. So far, so good.

But this kind of storyline faces a certain kind of risk: the text becomes in effect a kind of recipe book of stock analyses, with large chunks of the thinking that went into these analyses presented as faits accomplis, which students are expected to internalize and extend to new data. The result is a heavily ‘top-down’ presentation of syntax, making it a matter of mastering a typically complex set of technical tools, specialized notations, and axioms.

In December 2015 the official representatives of nearly 200 countries met in Paris to negotiate an agreement that would govern the global response to climate change and its impacts well into the twenty-first century. Climate change is among the most serious problems facing the international community. Rising global temperatures are threatening livelihoods and lives worldwide, through changing weather patterns, drought, and sea-level rise that threatens the very existence of the world's small island nation states. Even so, global action to date had proven deeply disappointing. The world's largest economy, the United States, had pulled out of negotiations. Others – even the member states of the European Union (EU), usually considered a strong supporter of environmental action – were barely meeting the low targets they had agreed to, and the new engines of the global economy – China, India, and Brazil – were rapidly increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions without any obligation to act. The science behind climate change continued to come under fierce attack from skeptics. Activist groups and even business actors felt excluded from the governance arena, despite the ideas and initiatives they were offering.

Global climate politics reached a nadir after the 2009 Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen. Much hope and optimism in the lead-up suggested that this would be the time the international community broke through and came up with a strong, binding legal agreement to meet commitments. Instead, the meeting almost foundered on the rock of national interests, and the resulting Copenhagen Accord – not even a formal agreement – was deeply disappointing to many, setting only weak goals and vague commitments to a new global fund.

The Paris meeting – the twenty-first COP to the UNFCCC – was different. On the last day of the conference nation-states announced an agreement where, rather than being allocated targets they had to meet, they had crafted individual plans of action for reducing emission, called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). The agreement also contained processes for monitoring (and perhaps strengthening) those commitments over time, and general commitments to help the weakest states adapt, to encourage carbon storage, and to aspire to keep the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The exhausted delegates, officials, and other observers stood to applaud at the conclusion of the meeting and the creation of the Paris Agreement.

The topicalization construction discussed in some detail in the previous chapter is only one of a wide variety of unbounded dependency phenomena in which a filler must be linked to a gap site. One can cluster these phenomena into two major groups, on grounds we discuss below, with a third group falling somewhere between the two, showing certain properties of both. For several decades all of these constructions linking fillers to gap site have been regarded as embodiments of a single connectivity mechanism – a view allowing a considerable simplification in syntacticians’ picture of the licensing conditions on natural language grammars. But what is the basis for this assumption?

The very earliest form taken by the argument for a unitary filler/gap mechanism shared by all unbounded dependencies was based on a particular set of constraints, or restrictions, to which all constructions embodying that mechanism were sensitive. In a very influential paper, Chomsky (1977) argued along these lines for an approach in which a single movement operation underlay all types of extraction phenomena. In the previous chapter, we've seen some instances of these constructions and noted that in certain languages they all display the same grammatical behavior in marking the intermediate substructures between fillers and gap sites in some special manner. We now look more systematically at the form of these various constructions, prior to a survey of the supposed syntactic constraints that they were thought to obey. The theoretical development of this set of constraints, and the attempt to derive them as effects from ever more abstract and general principles, is arguably the driving force behind most of the developments in syntactic theory from the mid-1970s on. We conclude with a review of the empirical status of the constraints themselves, and consequences of more recent research in this domain for syntax as a field of inquiry and as a component of the grammars of human languages.

Extraction Constructions in English

Fillers in Topic Position

The constructions we consider in this section are similar to topicalization in a crucial respect: they display a constituent at the left edge of the clause which is linked to an arbitrarily distant gap site.

In Chapter 4 we examined the factors that influence the construction of state-led environmental governance regimes, ending with critiques of this model of global environmental governance (GEG). Now we address these critiques directly, turning to assessing the impacts and effectiveness of environmental treaty regimes, issues that apply to analysis of any policy or governance initiative.

In Chapter 1 I argued that a central problem for global policy-makers in creating effective regimes is how to alter states’ willingness and capacity to comply with the terms of an international agreement. They must also ensure that the terms of this agreement are strong or designed well enough to address the environmental problem under negotiation, in other words that they contain a measure of problem-solving effectiveness. In turn, the ways these issues are addressed shape how regimes evolve and change, and whether they become progressively stronger, or falter with time (Young 2010).

In this chapter we discuss findings about environmental regime performance to date and define key terms and challenges in measuring regime impacts. We next examine how aspects of regime design create incentives – both positive and negative – that change state behavior over the short and long term. In this section we challenge the notion that international environmental regimes are weak because they lack full enforcement mechanisms or because they result from an unsatisfactory compromise of conflicting national interests. Finally, we delve into deeper changes regimes may bring about, including how they facilitate learning within regimes themselves and by the actors they seek to influence.

Half-Full or Half-Empty?

The field of international environmental politics (IEP) took an early lead within the discipline of international relations in generating research on the impacts and effectiveness of cooperation (Zürn 1998; O'Neill et al. 2004). Part of the reason for this is the problem-driven nature of the field. However, it is also the case that with such a large number of environmental treaties, many of which have been in place for many years, scholars began moving beyond the question of what makes states cooperate in the first place to examining the impacts of environmental treaty regimes as they mature.

From a problem-solving perspective we want to know how, and to what extent, international environmental diplomacy slows down, halts, or even reverses global environmental degradation. If treaty regimes are ineffective, we want to know how to improve their performance.

The auxiliary dependency analyzed in the preceding chapter takes the form of a complex network of distributional facts emerging as the consequence of a simple set of purely lexical properties. Both (i) the relative order of auxiliaries and so-called ‘main verbs’ (a notable misnomer, in our terms, since ‘main verbs’ in sentences with auxiliaries are actually deeply buried), and (ii) the morphology of clauses containing auxiliaries are due to the selectional properties of individual words, and the characteristic existence of gaps in the lexicon, along with a requirement that the top hierarchical level of English sentences be finite. Given these properties of individual words, the independently motivated featurematching requirements of the grammar, as laid out in the preceding chapters, automatically yield the correct morphosyntactic dependencies with no more effort than is required to specify that talk requires a PP complement and discuss an NP. This demonstration offers strong support for the general approach taken so far, but it would be reassuring to find that there are other, unrelated phenomena which can be satisfactorily described using the same machinery. In this chapter, we briefly survey several grammatical patterns in English and a range of other languages which can be captured rather simply using the same technology already implemented in the auxiliary analysis presented in the preceding chapter.

Case and Agreement

Case

The first of these patterns, referred to as case, identifies a generally systematic marking of the dependents of a head which often correlates with what would be called grammatical relations (subject/object/indirect object/adjunct), but which typically have additional semantic content; thus we talk about ‘dative’ case, associated with a beneficiary role, corresponding to Robin in I gave Robin a book (although this case is not realized in the form of English words) in which the transfer of some benefit to the individual marked with dative morphology is conveyed (though dative case may show up in nonbenefactive contexts as well, as we'll see below), or the possessive, as in Where is my book?, where possession is conveyed by my. In some languages, such as English, case is vestigial; although its distant ancestor Anglo-Saxon had a rich case system, reflecting the grammar of its own pan-Germanic ancestor and, ultimately, the ancestral Indo-European proto-language, English has lost almost all vestiges of this system.

This book opened with the outcome of the twenty-first Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held in Paris in December 2015. Notably, after years of stalemate on crafting a post-Kyoto agreement, states had finally decided a course of action. International relations theory and the theories of inter-state bargaining and cooperation we studied in Chapter 4 are critical in enabling us to follow and understand this outcome. Several elements of international cooperation theory are present. The interests of a powerful “laggard” state (the USA) had changed, at least at the executive level: President Obama had crafted a US plan based on actions the Executive Branch could take without the approval of Congress, which remained opposed. The French, by all accounts, ran a tight meeting, pushing delegates toward agreement on a number of difficult issues. Perhaps most importantly in explaining the immediate outcome, a huge part of the negotiations – the part that had stymied negotiations in previous years – was bypassed. By submitting individual national plans the negotiations were able to start with commitments in place, allowing delegates to focus on other issues in the regime, such as finance and monitoring. For many reasons, the ultimate agreement deserved the standing ovation it received on the final day of the COP, representing a significant political advance over earlier efforts.

However, the issue pushed most strongly by the least developed countries – the need for a Loss and Damage Protocol to compensate for unavoidable climate-related damage – failed. Nor were significant transparency, monitoring, and verification measures put in place: that decision was put off for three years. Further, while the “bottom-up” approach was hailed as a way to break through negotiating deadlocks, concerns remain about the big differences among plans, which allowed some countries (such as Russia) to commit to very little. Still, according to studies, while we are well past meeting the 1.5° Celsius goal parties agreed on, if all individual national plans are fulfilled (a big if), we may be on target to a rise of less than 3°, less than earlier studies predicted and low enough to avoid disaster. Parties will meet every three years to review – and strengthen – their commitments.