According to the biblical book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), “the making of many books is without end.” I don't know about “many books,” but the making of this book has sometimes appeared to be without end. It began some forgotten day in the late 1980s when the idle thought crossed my mind: “How might one redesign GB Case theory to account for ergative languages?” A very early exploration of the issues in this book, in the guise of GB Case theory, was published in Linguistics in 1991, under the title “Case: Abstract and Morphological.” I also presented several papers on Case, ergativity, and such at conferences of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics in the 1990s. But in the course of trying to understand ergative languages I began to realize that the GB framework was missing something. What this “something” was started to become clearer to me when I started considering Philippine-type languages, because it was obvious to me that direct reference to grammatical functions was necessary to account for the “voice” morphology.

This realization led me back to LFG, the theoretical framework in which I had begun my linguistic career. I began reframing the work that I had been doing in terms of LFG. A presentation at the 1999 conference of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association received encouraging responses. In the fall semester of the 1999–2000 academic year, I was fortunate to be able to spend a sabbatical as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, hosted by Joan Bresnan.