Human language is a phenomenon of immense richness: It provides finely nuanced means of
expression that underlie the formation of culture and society it is subject to subtle
unexpected constraints like syntactic islands and cross-over phenomena different
mutually-unintelligeable individual languages are numerous and the descriptions of individual
languages occupy thousands of pages. Recent work in linguistics however has tried to argue
that despite all appearances to the contrary the human biological capacity for language may be
reducible to a small inventory of core cognitive competencies. The most radical version of this
view has emerged from the Minimalist Program: The claim that language consists of only the
ability to generate recursive structures by a computational mechanism. On this view all other
properties of language must result from the interaction at the interfaces of that mechanism and
other mental systems not exclusively devoted to language. Since language could then be
described as the simplest recursive system satisfying the requirements of the interfaces one
can speak of the Minimalist Equation: Interfaces + Recursion = Language.The question whether
all the richness of language can be reduced to that minimalist equation has already inspired
several fruitful lines of research that led to important new results. While a full assessment
of the minimalist equation will require evidence from many different areas of inquiry this
volume focuses especially on the perspective of syntax and semantics. Within the minimalist
architecture this places our concern with the core computational mechanism and the
(LF-)interface where recursive structures are fed to interpretation. Specific questions that
the papers address are: What kind of recursive structures can the core generator form? How can
we determine what the simplest recursive system is? How can properties of language that used to
be ascribed to the recursive generator be reduced to interface properties? What effects do
syntactic operations have on semantic interpretation? To what extent do models of semantic
interpretation support the LF-interface conditions postulated by minimalist syntax?
