This volume offers a collection of brief and orginal articles that aim at developing the minimalist approach to language. In this introduction, we would like to discuss certain issues concerning the Minimalist Program and the concept of Universal Grammar as well as to present the contributions of the volume.
The term minimalism is typically associated to certain artistic tendencies whose work is said to be stripped down to its most fundamental features. In the linguistic agenda developed by Noam Chomsky and others since the early nineties, this term is endowed with the same aesthetic concern of searching for the most fundamental features of grammatical theory, but it crucially adds a substantive commitment to investigate to what extent language is—in a sense we clarify below—a perfect system.
In Martin & Uriagereka (2000) this bifurcated path to pursue the Minimalist Program (MP) is emphasized by establishing a distinction between methodological minimalism and substantive minimalism. The methodological facet is concerned with the “theory of language” under construction, whereas the substantive facet is concerned with how well designed “language itself” is. Methodological minimalism seeks those components of a linguistic theory that are redundant, stipulative, and idiosyncratic, in order to eliminate or reformulate them in the form of parsimonius, well-grounded, and general principles. Substantive minimalism explores whether an alleged property of language is a genuine property or an apparent property, and if genuine, whether it satisfies the Strongest Minimalist Thesis—SMT (see Chomsky 2000)—, i.e., whether it is an optimal solution to the requirements imposed by the external systems.

Index. Particles and prepositions

7   Bosque, Ignacio. On disjunctive dependencies.
23 Dikken, Marcel den. Directions from the GET-GO. On the syntax of manner-of-motion verbs in directional constructions.
55 Fábregas, Antonio. On Spanish Prepositional Prefixes and the Cartography of Prepositions.
79 Gallego, Ángel J. On the prepositional nature of non-finite verbs.
103 Pavón Lucero, María Victoria. Why Are There No Locative Conjunctions in Spanish?
125 Real Puigdollers, Cristina. A microparametric approach on goal of motion constructions: properties of adpositional systems in Romance and Germanic.
151 Rigau, Gemma; Suïls, Jordi. Microvariation in Catalan and Occitan complementizers: the so-called expletive se.
167 Terzi,Arhonto. On null spatial PS and their arguments.
189 Resums

In recent times, there has been an increasing concern for the interaction between information structure and syntax, and its effect in language change. The aim of this volume is to provide the reader with comparative research into the role of informa- tion structure in language change from a crosslinguistic perspective and to con- tribute to a better understanding of structural changes and their possible relation to information structure factors.
From a synchronic standpoint, information packaging is jointly conveyed by semantics, prosody and syntax. In contrast, diachronic linguistics lacks the evidence of prosodic information, but it can still rely on the relation between discourse semantics and syntax in old written texts, as well as on the comparison with syn- chronic data, to set light on the phenomena involved in syntactic changes driven by information structural configurations.
Concerning language change, it is generally accepted that the focus of inves- tigation is on I-language and that language acquirers select cues that are robustly represented in main clauses of the Primary Linguistic Data of their environment so as to feed into particular parameters of UG (see Fischer et al. 2000, Batllori et al. 2005, Kemenade 2007 and Roberts 2007). From this cue-based acquisition perspec- tive, it could be the case that information structural factors might constitute triggers for syntactic changes (for example, word order change –see Westergaard 2010).
The analysis of discursive information in written texts has increased in recent years due to the contribution of the cartographic approach (from Rizzi 1997 onwards) and the studies related to the CP field within the minimalist program. These two approaches, even though apparently in conflict, are actually comple- mentary in many respects. As Cinque and Rizzi (2008: 49) observe, «Minimalism focuses on the generating devices, and cartography focuses on the fine details of the generated structures, two research topics which can be pursued in parallel in a fully consistent manner, and along lines which can fruitfully interact».

The study of loanwords is almost as old as the study of phonology itself. In 19th century diachronic linguistics borrowed words were utilized to establish the relative chronology of sound changes as well as to explain exceptions to otherwise general sound laws. Loans can also shed light on the earlier state of a language that has been obscured by subsequent sound changes. In 20th century Structuralism loanwords were seen as a challenge to the thesis of a single unified sound system (Fries and Pike 1949). Within the generative tradition, the study of rules associated with a stratified lexicon was carried forward by McCawley (1968), Lightner (1972), and others. Another motivation for the study of borrowings was that loans could demonstrate the productivity of rules and constraints as well as to resolve alternative synchronic analysis (Hyman 1970). With the rise of a Constraints and Repair view of phonology in the 1980’s the study of loans in and of themselves was a natural step since the direct importation of a loan from the donor language typically violates some inventory or phonotactic constraint that must be modified (repaired) in order to conform to the native L1 system of the borrowing language (Paradis and LaCharité 1997). Loanword Phonology was given a significant boost by the development of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, 2004), which provided a formal framework in which the adaptations could be studied (Yip 1993). With its key notion of faithfulness, OT can model the fact that modifications of the source word are typically minimal and only introduced to satisfy a constraint of the borrowing language. OT can also make sense of changes that go counter to native grammar repair by appeal to differential faithfulness with respect to markedness (Steriade 2001, Kenstowicz 2005). In many cases the native grammar offers no guidelines as to how a loan should be repaired. The fact that speakers seem to often converge on a particular repair raises serious learnability problems for these emergent strategies (Broselow 2009). Possible answers have included direct access to innate but low ranked UG constraints (Shinohara 2000, 2004, Kenstowicz and Sohn 2001), access to an internal P-Map that allows the speaker to compare alternative repairs and select the one that is minimal (i.e. most similar to the source word—Steriade 2009). Another possibily relevant factor is frequency: when two alternative repairs are available, choose the one that leads to the more frequent structure in the L1 lexicon (Kim 2012). The current literature is grappling with these questions of emergence and different repairs for what appear to be equivalent inputs. Their subtlety and sophistication is a testament to how far the study of loanwords has progressed; their difficulty is a challenge to all future research.

This issue of the Catalan Journal of Linguistics  was conceived with the idea to promote comparative studies of the languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula. The importance of comparison in linguistics dates back to neogrammarians in the xix century due to their interest of discovering the common roots of most of the lan- guages spoken in Europe. In order to get to that objective, comparison of phonologi- cal patterns were crucial to retrieve the common Indo-European origins.
In the generative framework variation and comparison was not highlighted until the advent of Lectures on Government and Binding  (Chomsky 1981), which marks the beginning of the Principles and Parameter theory. A parameter, in its original conception, is a principle with a dimension of variability with respect to a specific syntactic property (Head-initial or Head-final, Node for Subjaceny: S or S’). This variation can be expressed with the values + or –, and each value is associated to a series of syntactic correlations.