Abstract Earlier work has shown that movement, which forms the backbone of Minimalist syntax, belongs in the subregular class of TSL-2 dependencies over trees. The central idea is that movement, albeit unbounded, boils down to local mother-daughter dependencies on a specific substructure …
More Output
- read more
Subregular tree transductions, movement, copies, traces, and the ban on improper movement
read moreAbstract Extending prior work in Graf (2018, 2020, 2022c), I show that movement is tier-based strictly local (TSL) even if one analyzes it as a transformation, i.e. a tree transduction from derivation trees to output trees. I define input strictly local (ISL …
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 …
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 …
Diagnosing Movement via the Absence of C-command Relations
read moreAbstract In this paper, we propose a new diagnostic for movement. It has been argued in the computational linguistics literature that some constraints can be formalized by path constraints on the sequence of their c-commanders (Graf and Shafiei 2019), and …
Modeling island effects with probabilistic tier-based strictly local grammars over trees
read moreAbstract We fuse two recent strands of work in subregular linguistics—probabilistic tier projections (Mayer, 2021) and tier-based perspectives on movement (Graf, 2022a)—into a probabilistic model of syntax that makes it easy to add gradience …
Modeling island effects with probabilistic tier-based strictly local grammars over trees
read moreAbstract We fuse two recent strands of work in subregular linguistics—probabilistic tier projections (Mayer, 2021) and tier-based perspectives on movement (Graf, 2022a)—into a probabilistic model of syntax that makes it easy to add gradience …
- read more
Abstract Based on an earlier finding that almost all c-command dependencies amount to subregular constraints on c-strings, we argue that all exceptions to this generalization involve movement. Since regulating movement is already known to be beyond the purview of c-strings, it is only natural that …
- read more
Abstract Various aspects of syntax have recently been characterized in subregular terms. However, these characterizations operate over very different representations, including string encodings of c-command relations as well as tiers projected from derivation trees. We present a way to unify these approaches via sensing tree …
- read more
Abstract This paper presents a novel answer to the question why Move might be an integral part of language. The answer is rooted in the computational framework of subregular complexity, which has already been fruitfully applied to phonology. The computational perspective reveals that Merge belongs …
- read more
Abstract This work is a first tentative step towards motivating constraints on movement as a mechanism for minimizing grammar size.
Recently is has been proved that every Minimalist grammar can be converted into a strongly equivalent single movement normal form such that every phrase moves …
- read more
Abstract This work is a first tentative step towards motivating constraints on movement as a mechanism for minimizing grammar size.
Recently is has been proved that every Minimalist grammar can be converted into a strongly equivalent single movement normal form such that every phrase moves …
- read more
Abstract Two linguistic findings are commonly taken for granted yet are anything but trivial:
- Phrases can be displaced from their base position.
- Some phrases block displacement.
On a technical level, these properties are hashed out in terms of movement and islands. From a naive perspective …
- read more
Abstract Minimalist grammars have been used recently in a series of papers to explain well-known contrasts in human sentence processing in terms of subtle structural differences. These proposals combine a top-down parser with complexity metrics that relate parsing difficulty to memory usage. So far, though …
- read more
:::bibtex @Misc{GrafEtAl16IACSposter, author = {Graf, Thomas and Monette, James and Pasternak, Robert and Zhang, Chong}, author+an = {2=sbu;3=sbu;4=sbu}, title = {Memory Usage Predicts Relative Difficulty in Human Sentence Processing}, year = {2016}, note = {Poster presented at the {IACS} {R … - read more
Abstract Recently there has been a lot of interest in testing the processing predictions of a specific top-down parser for Minimalist grammars (Stabler 2012). Most of this work relies on memory-based difficulty metrics that relate the shape of the parse tree to processing behavior. We …
- read more
Abstract Recently there has been a lot of interest in testing the processing predictions of a specific top-down parser for Minimalist grammars (Stabler 2012). Most of this work relies on memory-based difficulty metrics that relate the shape of the parse tree to processing behavior. We …
- read more
Abstract A common sentiment among linguists is that the Minimalist literature features a dazzling array of competing proposals that seem to share little common ground in their technical assumptions. While differences certainly do exist between accounts, a computationally informed perspective reveals a set of invariants …
- read more
Abstract Minimalist grammars can be specified in terms of their derivation tree languages and a mapping from derivations to derived trees, each of which is definable in monadic second-order logic (MSO). It has been shown that the linguistically motivated operation Late Merge can push either …
- read more
Abstract Minimalist grammars can be specified in terms of their derivation tree languages and a mapping from derivations to derived trees, each of which is definable in monadic second-order logic (MSO). It has been shown that the linguistically motivated operation Late Merge can push either …
- read more
Abstract Even though Minimalist grammars are more powerful than TAG on the string level, the classes of tree languages the two define are incomparable. I give a constructive proof that if the standard Move operation in Minimalist grammars is replaced by Reset Lowering, every TAG …
- read more
Abstract TAG and Minimalist grammars (MGs) are related in very interesting ways. Even though MGs subsume TAGs at the level of string languages, their respective classes of tree languages are incomparable (Kobele et al 2007, Mönnich 2006). As pointed out by Mönnich (2006), this is …
- read more
Abstract A general framework is presented that allows for Minimalist grammars to use arbitrary movement operations under the proviso that they are all definable by monadic second-order formulas over derivation trees. Lowering, sidewards movement, and clustering, among others, are the result of instantiating the parameters …
- read more
Abstract A general framework is presented that allows for Minimalist grammars to use arbitrary movement operations under the proviso that they are all definable by monadic second-order formulas over derivation trees. Lowering, sidewards movement, and clustering, among others, are the result of instantiating the parameters …