This volume presents a selection of contributions from the week-long Cyprus Syntaxfest in 2006, which brought together research in syntax by several respected and prolific theoretical linguists from all over the world. During the six days of the Syntaxfest, work from a variety of viewpoints in modern generative grammar was presented, and the research discussed and debated followed diverse methodological paths, with the thematic focus on left peripheries in linguistic structures and (their) interface interpretation.

The current collection of expanded versions of selected research presented at the Cyprus Syntaxfest reflects a wide variety of approaches to these topics; it also provides a glimpse of the rich sample of cross-linguistic data that informed the discussions of syntactic peripheries and their interface interpretation. It offers eleven studies on clausal and nominal left-peripheral phenomena and their (role in) interpretation in a variety of typologically unrelated languages. More significantly, the contributions collected here underscore the by now established importance and theoretical interest of studying the edge of constituents, whether phasal or not. In every chapter, the blueprint of a general interpretive hierarchy driving and constraining syntax is also retraced throughout.