Abstract Minimalist grammars have been criticized for their inability to analyze successive cyclic movement and multiple wh-movement in a manner that is faithful to the Minimalist literature. Persistent features have been proposed in the literature as a potential remedy (Stabler …
More Output
- read more
Multiple Wh-Movement Is Not Special: The Subregular Complexity of Persistent Features in Minimalist Grammars
read moreAbstract Minimalist grammars have been criticized for their inability to analyze successive cyclic movement and multiple wh-movement in a manner that is faithful to the Minimalist literature. Persistent features have been proposed in the literature as a potential remedy (Stabler …
Are Syntactic Categories ISL-2 Inferrable? A Corpus Study
read moreAbstract We use the MG treebank of Torr (2017) to investigate the conjecture in Graf (2020) that category systems are ISL-2 inferrable. A category system is ISL-2 inferrable iff the category feature of every lexical item …
Curbing Feature Coding: Strictly Local Feature Assignment
read moreAbstract Graf (2017) warns that every syntactic formalism faces a severe overgeneration problem because of the hidden power of subcategorization. Any constraint definable in monadic second-order logic can be compiled into the category system so that it is indirectly enforced as part of …
Features: More Trouble Than They’re Worth?
read moreAbstract Do contemporary syntactic theories rely on too many features? Decades of computational research have culminated in two contradictory answers:
- Yes, there are too many features because having at least two features is already one too many and brings in undesirable overgeneration.
- No …
Do We Need Features for Morphosyntax?
read moreAbstract Bobaljik & Sauerland’s *ABA and the Combinatorics of Morphological Features attempts to explain the absence of ABA patterns across languages in terms of feature combinatorics. Their approach marks a step in the right direction by focusing on the algebra underlying the feature …
Adjuncts, Conjuncts, Ojuncts: Deriving Strong Island Constraints
read moreAbstract Adjuncts differ from arguments by a number of properties, in particular i) optionality and ii) their island status, which renders them opaque for extraction of subconstituents. Conjuncts, too, are optional and forbid extraction. Starting from this basic observation, I demonstrate that islandhood …
A Computational Guide to the Dichotomy of Features and Constraints
read moreAbstract I draw on various result from mathematical linguistics to argue that feature-based accounts and constraint-based ones should not be viewed as competing with each other but rather as complementing each other. In particular, recent results on Minimalist grammars show that features and …
Adjuncts, Islands, Algebra (with a Sprinkling of Semantics)
Optionality Implies Islandhood
Local and Transderivational Constraints in Syntax and Semantics
read moreAbstract A long-standing tension in Minimalist syntax is that between the structure-building operations Merge and Move on the one hand and the constraints restricting the shape of the structures built by said operations on the other. Proposals differ vastly in how much weight …
The Price of Freedom: Why Adjuncts Are Islands
read moreAbstract I propose that if one takes seriously the Minimalist idea that syntax is driven by Merge and the feature calculus, the status of adjuncts as strong islands follows immediately from the properties that set them apart from arguments: optionality and iterability. This …
Constraints Emerge from Merge