This chapter is an introduction to a minimalist approach to German syntax. It starts with very basic concepts (like lexical items, categories, complements, specifiers, modifiers, derivations, and Merge), and goes on to carefully develop accounts of basic structure building (external Merge) and of movement (internal Merge). Furthermore, the concept of Agree is introduced, as are two fundamental principles of derivational syntax: the Strict Cycle Condition and the Cyclic Principle. Various kinds of movement types are analyzed in detail (among them wh-movement, scrambling, pronoun fronting, topicalization, relativization, and extraposition). The notion of successive-cyclic long-distance movement is introduced, and four different morpho-syntactic reflexes of movement are identified for German. Next, the role of edge features and improper movement is clarified. Finally, a concept of cyclic Agree is postulated for Agree relations in German syntax that are not strictly local.

The book argues that the research program of modern Generative Grammar (GG) has been a resounding success. More particularly, it argues that the most current stage of this more general enterprise, the Minimalist Program (MP), has provided profound insights into the structure of the faculty of language (FL). The book outlines the central Minimalist thesis (the Merge Hypothesis) and suggests ways of extending its explanatory reach.

This chapter rounds off the book by recapitulating the argument that the research program of modern Generative Grammar has provided profound insights into the structure of the faculty of language (FL) to explain both linguistic creativity and linguistic flexibility. The proposal is that the Generative enterprise has allowed us to examine what kinds of recursive procedures natural language grammars contain, and to understand key aspects of the fine structure of FL. The Minimalist Program then asks the obvious next question of why FL has the particular structure Generativists discovered it to have. It is argued that the central Minimalist thesis, the Merge Hypothesis (MH), explains how linguistic creativity is the product of a very simple combinatoric operation (i.e. Merge), and then showed how the MH can be extended (into the EMH) by the addition of labels to cover most of the generalizations discovered in the past sixty years of Generative research.

Our understanding of the syntax of natural language and syntactic aspects that obtain across languages and other aspects that display variation has greatly benefited from research on a large number of languages representing a diversity of language families learned natively in their own contexts. We have a better understanding, for example, of the complexity of word order, agreement, case, questions, relative clauses, anaphoric dependencies, etc. As our empirical generalizations continue to be sharpened and refined, the Generative approach, particularly in its Minimalist version, has also been focusing on isolating properties of core syntax, such as Merge (both Internal and External) and the features and units that go into building syntactic structure and driving the different syntactic dependencies. Research on heritage languages has the potential to contribute to that debate. This chapter discusses some of the results of that research and its implications for the debate about Merge, movement, and the notion of root as an essential building block of syntactic structure.