The overall feeling one is left with after reading David Lebeaux's Linguistic Inquiry monograph is one of disappointment. It could not be otherwise: the monograph deals with the binding theory and the architecture of the human language faculty, but including references, index and all, it remains below one hundred pages, and thus pales in comparison to Ken Safir's two volumes on binding (Safir Reference Safir2004a, Reference Safirb), Norbert Hornstein's treatment of this topic (Hornstein Reference Hornstein2001), and Eric Reuland's Linguistic Inquiry monograph (Reuland Reference Reuland2011). I am not one to be impressed by sheer length or number of pages, but given the richness of the topic under investigation (binding conditions A, B and C), one is entitled to expect chapters of more than ten pages each, especially if the manuscript that formed the basis of the monograph began circulating in 1998.

There is indeed very little that is new in Lebeaux's monograph. Lebeaux defends the idea that unlike condition A of the binding theory, conditions B and C must be satisfied throughout the syntactic derivation, and not just at the end of the syntactic computation (‘at LF’). Conditions that apply at LF (like condition A of the binding theory), Lebeaux calls positive conditions; conditions that cannot be violated at any point during the derivation, he calls negative conditions. This distinction was put to good use in various works on binding when it was first proposed more than a decade ago (see e.g. Epstein et al. Reference Epstein, Groat, Kawashima and Kitahara1998), but its influence has decreased considerably in light of models of grammar where the interpretive systems are accessed as the derivation unfolds, such as Chomsky's (Reference Chomsky, Martin, Michaels and Uriagereka2000) phase-based model. Unfortunately, Lebeaux does not explore the consequences of his ideas in light of such models. In fact, he does not fully engage with any of the literature published after 2000: only a few recent works are cited, and they are not discussed in any detail. It is as if the monograph fell through the printer's cracks, only to be rediscovered and published in a hurry many years later. As a result, the reader will find the monograph distinctly out of synch with current attempts to re-think the foundations of the binding theory. Unlike in the works by, for example, Safir, Hornstein, and Reuland mentioned above, one finds no attempt in Lebeaux's monograph to ask why there should be three binding conditions, why these three, and why the grammar should care about anaphors and pronouns in the way that it does. Even more puzzlingly, one finds no cross-linguistic discussion in Lebeaux's book. In an area like binding where, since the emergence of the Principles and Parameters model, we have learned so much about the cross-linguistic variation that exists, this is a gap that is intolerable.

In Samuel Jay Keyser's foreword to the Linguistic Inquiry monograph series, we read that Linguistic Inquiry monographs present ‘new and original research beyond the scope of an article’. Truth be told, I do not think that this is the case with Lebeaux's book. The research presented here may have been original and new at the end of the 1990s, but it ceased to be new a while back, and there is little to suggest that the material could not have been published as an article. A monograph would have been required (indeed, for my part, eagerly anticipated) only if Lebeaux had built on his previous work and engaged with the literature of the past ten years.

One day, when I was in graduate school, trying to come up with a feasible thesis topic, my teacher, Howard Lasnik, told me that the days in which someone could write a sixty-page dissertation on negation, as he did (Lasnik 1969), were long gone, and for a good reason, because we have learned so much in the intervening years. There are many theories to compare, many analytical options to discard, and many facts from many languages to grapple with. The same should be true of monographs. It may very well be that the ultimate theory can be demonstrated by means of a few short sentences, and can be written on the back of a postcard, but I do not think that we are quite there yet. We still have too many questions to answer, and readers, reviewers and editors should insist on at least some of these being addressed in sufficient detail.