Abstract Transderivational constraints (TC) formed an integral part of the early Minimalist Program. I develop a formal model of TCs firmly rooted in automata theory and subsequently argue that
- in general, TCs aren’t computationally intractable, nor does their complexity exceed that of non-transderivational constraints;
- TCs have technical advantages over normal constraints in accounting for cross-linguistic variation;
- an automata-theoretic approach brings us closer to a unified perspective on three rather distant research traditions, each of them with their unique body of empirical results: TCs, OT, and Synchronous Tree-Adjoining Grammar.
As an illustration of the applicability of this formal model, I exhibit precise implementations of Focus Economy (Reinhart 2006) and the Merge-over-Move condition (Chomsky 1998).
@Misc{Graf10NELStalk,
author = {Graf, Thomas},
title = {Rethinking Transderivationality},
year = {2010},
note = {Slides of a talk given at the 41$^{\text{st}}$ annual
meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 41),
October 22--24, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia,
PA}
}