1. Contributors; 2. Acknowledgments; 3. Abbreviations; 4. Introduction: When verbs come first (by Carnie, Andrew); 5. Part I. VP movement vs Head-movement; 6. What fronts?: On the VP-raising account of verb-initial order (by Chung, Sandra); 7. Coordination and constituency in St'at'imcets (Lillooet Salish) (by Davis, Henry); 8. Two derivations of VSO: A comparative study of Niuean and Tongan (by Otsuka, Yuko); 9. Force first: Clause-fronting and clause typing in San Lucas Quiavini Zapotec (by Lee, Felicia); 10. V1 and wh-questions: a typology (by Oda, Kenji); 11. Preverbal particles in verb-initial languages (by Bury, Dirk); 12. A note on predicates and heads in Irish clausal syntax (by McCloskey, James); 13. Seediq: Antisymmetry and final particles in a Formosan VOS language (by Holmer, Arthur); 14. VP-internal structure in a VOS language (by Travis, Lisa deMena); 15. Part II. Categories, Information Structure, and Prosodic factors; 16. Lexical categories, lack of inflection, and predicate-fronting in Niuean (by Massam, Diane); 17. Word order without syntactic categories: How Riau Indonesian does it (by Gil, David); 18. Nominal properties of vPs in Breton: A hypothesis for the typology of VSO languages (by Jouitteau, Melanie); 19. On the parallelism of DPs and clauses: Evidence from Kisongo Maasai (by Koopman, Hilda); 20. Ordering clitics and postverbal R-expressions in Tagalog: a unified analysis? (by Billings, Loren); 21. The syntax of Chalcatongo Mixtec: Preverbal and postverbal (by Macaulay, Monica); 22. Accounting for verb-initial order in an Australian language (by Laughren, Mary); 23. References; 24. Index

This books presents valuable insights into the syntax of a variety of verb-initial languages and as such is a great contribution to our understanding of syntax. Accounting for word order across languages is one of the main goals of syntactic theory, yet it is the word order problems that often present the toughest challenges for syntacticians. The research represented in this book goes a long way in elucidating the issues related to a particular subset of word orders, those where the verb comes first. As such, this book not only provides an overview of the cutting-edge research on this subject, but also sets goals for future research.