Locality in Minimalist Syntax

In this highly original reanalysis of minimalist syntax, Thomas Stroik considers theoptimal design properties for human language. Taking as his starting point Chomsky's minimalistassumption that the syntactic component of a language generates representations for sentences thatare interpreted at perceptual and conceptual interfaces, Stroik investigates how theserepresentations can be generated most parsimoniously. Countering the prevailing analyses ofminimalist syntax, he argues that the computational properties of human language consist only ofstrictly local Merge operations that lack both look-back and look-forward properties. Allgrammatical operations reduce to a single sort of locally defined feature-checking operation, andall grammatical properties are the cumulative effects of local grammatical operations. As Stroikdemonstrates, reducing syntactic operations to local operations with a single property--merginglexical material into syntactic derivations--not only radically increases the computationalefficiency of the syntactic component, but it also optimally simplifies the design of thecomputational system. Locality in Minimalist Syntax explains a range of syntactic phenomena thathave long resisted previous generative theories, including that-trace effects, superiority effects,and the interpretations available for multiple-wh constructions. It also introduces the SurvivePrinciple, an important new concept for syntactic analysis, and provides something consideredimpossible in minimalist syntax: a locality account of displacement phenomena.

Thehardcover edition does not include a dust jacket.

Thomas S. Stroik is Professor of English and Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is the author of Syntactic Controversies; Minimalism, Scope, and VP Structure; Path Theory and Argument Structure; and The Pragmatics of Metaphor.