Stefan Ploch is Senior Lecturer of Linguistics at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

This collection of papers by an international group of authors honors Jonathan Kaye's contributions to phonology by expanding some of Kaye's ideas to a variety of theoretical topics and languages. The set of ideas discussed or used in this collection includes: empty categories, licensing relationships and constraints, a restrictive two-levelled approach to phonology (without rule ordering or constraint ranking), a restrictive theory of syllabic representation (without the codas constituent and with exclusively binary branching), theories of the phonology-phonetics interface in which phonology is motivated independently of phonetics, and the metatheoretical flaws in a number of widely accepted but rarely questioned views on phonology.