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# Rethinking Transderivationality

Graf, Thomas

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).

Files [pdf] [code]

@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}
}