One problem students face in “getting into” minimalism is the difficulty in seeing how the specific proposals advanced reflect the larger programmatic concerns. This book is our attempt to show why minimalism is an exciting research program and to explain how the larger issues that motivate the program get translated into specific technical proposals. We believe that a good way of helping novices grasp both the details and the whole picture is to introduce facets of the Minimalist Program against a GB-background. In particular, we show how minimalist considerations motivate rethinking and replacing GB-assumptions and technical machinery. This allows us to construct the new minimalist future in the bowels of the older GB-world and gives the uninitiated some traction for the exhausting work of getting to a minimalist plane by leveraging their efforts with more familiar GB-bootstraps. In the end, we are confident that the reader will have a pretty good picture of what minimalism is and how (and why) it came about, and should be well equipped to pursue minimalist explorations him- or herself.

Given this pedagogical approach, this book has an intended audience. Although it does not presuppose any familiarity with minimalism, it is written for those who already have a background in linguistics and syntax. This ideal reader has taken a course in GB and this is an introduction to minimalism for such a person; it is not an intro to syntax nor an intro to linguistics.