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This chapter offers a thorough introduction to nanosyntactic theory, a development of the cartographic program in generative grammar. It discusses the foundations on which nanosyntax was conceived, such as the “one feature–one head” maxim and the universal functional sequence (fseq). It also provides a brief comparison of theoretical and terminological issues in nanosyntax vs. the competing framework of Distributed Morphology. It is seen that the syntactic component according to nanosyntax unifies aspects of (what are traditionally called) syntax, morphology, and formal semantics. This is reflected in the tools used to probe linguistic structure in the nanosyntactic approach, such as morphological decomposition, syncretism, and containment. The chapter also discusses the technical details of the syntax–lexicon relation, detailing the matching or spellout process and Starke’s view of spellout-driven movement. This chapter is meant to provide readers with the necessary background to understand and navigate the rest of the chapters in this volume.

At a general level, Chapter 1 is concerned with the categorization of expressions in natural languages. The authors approach this question with a relatively new tool in hand: phrasal spellout (Starke 2009). If phrasal spellout exists, a single item may correspond to several terminals, where each terminal has a distinct label. As a consequence, the approach predicts the existence of expressions whose behavior corresponds to a mixture of prototypical categorical properties. The chapter applies this relatively new analytical option to locative markers in Shona and Luganda. It contrasts them with more familiar Indo-European adpositions, in order to show that their behavior is distinct from ordinary adpositions and other word classes. The behavior of the new class, however, is not explained by positing a new category in the decomposed projection, but by proposing that it corresponds to a combination of several existing categories.

Kim (2011) observes that particles marking Korean clauses as interrogatives have the same shape as second person pronouns and proposes that this is because the particles are the addressee of a performative projection at the top of interrogative clauses. This chapter shows that this neat generalization is naturally implemented by phrasal spellout (and its Superset Theorem), including the fact that in some dialects the shape of some particles drift away from pronouns.

Higher-function words such as complementizers, negation, functional prepositions, definiteness particles, comparative markers, and so forth, occurring to the left of their lexical category, are argued to be base-generated as complex left branches, rather than spelling out the main functional sequence. This is generalized to all (base-generated) pre-asymmetries and post-asymmetries and derived from the structure of the lexical entries of the function words, dispensing with idiosyncratic notational devices equivalent to [+ suffix] or [+ needs-to-move]. These complex left branches require a merge-XP operation, and the place of this operation in the algorithm of spellout-driven movement is discussed.