This is the most comprehensive, integrated account yet published of the properties of question formations and their variations across languages. Movement in Language develops a new set of arguments for the controversial claim that syntax should be understood derivationally; that is, that the best model of language is one in which sentences are constructed in a series of operations that precede or follow each other in time. The arguments are exemplified through reference to a number of languages, including Bulgarian, Japanese, English, Chinese, and Serbo-Croatian.

This is the most comprehensive, integrated account yet published of the properties of question formations and their variations across languages. Movement in Language develops a new set of arguments for the controversial claim that syntax should be understood derivationally; that is, that the best model of language is one in which sentences are constructed in a series of operations that precede or follow each other in time. The arguments are exemplified through reference to a number of languages, including Bulgarian, Japanese, English, Chinese, and Serbo-Croatian.

In The Ethics of Parenthood Norvin Richards explores the moral relationship between parents and children from slightly before the cradle to slightly before the grave. Richards maintains that biological parents do ordinarily have a right to raise their children, not as a property right but as an instance of our general right to continue whatever we have begun. The contention is that creating a child is a first act of parenthood, hence it ordinarily carries a right to continue as parent to that child. Implications are drawn for a wide range of cases, including those of Baby Jessica and Baby Richard, prenatal abandonment, babies switched at birth and sent home with the wrong parents, and families separated by war or natural disaster.
A second contention is that children have a claim of their own to have their autonomy respected, and that this claim is stronger the better the grounds for believing that what the child's actions express is a self of the child's own. A final set of chapters concern parents and their grown children. Views are offered about what duties parents have at this stage of life, about what is required in order to treat grown children as adults, and about what obligations grown children have to their parents.
In the final chapter Richards discusses the contention that parents sometimes have an obligation to die rather than permit their children to make the sacrifices needed to keep them alive, arguing that a leading view about this undervalues both love and autonomy.

A study of the interface between syntax and phonology that seeks deeper explanations for such syntactic problems as case phenomena and the distribution of overt and covert wh-movement. In Uttering Trees, Norvin Richards investigates the conditions imposed upon syntax by the need to create syntactic objects that can be interpreted by phonolog-that is, objects that can be pronounced. Drawing extensively on linguistic data from a variety of languages, including Japanese, Basque, Tagalog, Spanish, Kinande (Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Chaha (Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia), Richards makes two new proposals about the relationship between syntax and phonology. The first, "Distinctness," has to do with the process of imposing a linear order on the constituents of the tree. Richards claims that syntactic nodes with many properties in common cannot be directly linearized and must be kept structurally distant from each other. He argues that a variety of syntactic phenomena can be explained by this generalization, including much of what has traditionally been covered by case theory. Richards's second proposal, "Beyond Strength and Weakness," is an attempt to predict, for any given language, whether that language will exhibit overt or covert wh-movement. Richards argues that we can predict whether or not a language can leave wh in situ by investigating more general properties of its prosody. This proposal offers an explanation for a cross-linguistic difference-that wh-phrases move overtly in some languages and covertly in others-that has hitherto been simply stipulated. In both these areas, it appears that syntax begins constructing a phonological representation earlier than previously thought; constraints on both word order and prosody begin at the beginning of the derivation.