Transformations across components

As Chomsky (1995b:222) characterizes the familiar observation, "objects appear in the sensory output in positions 'displaced' from those positions in which they are interpreted, under the most principled assumptions about interpretation." Chomsky (1995b:316) makes the same point and continues: "There is no meaningful controversy about the basic facts. They only questions are, what are the mechanisms of displacement, and why do they exist?" This study, conducted within the Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995b), is an investigation of these "displacements". The leading intuition is that transformational operations (displacements, in the above sense) take place "across components". That is, that they take place both in the syntactic computation from the numeration to SPELL-OUT (which continues to the LF interface), and also in the phonological computation from SPELL-OUT to the PF interface. The central goal of this study is to elaborate this intuition, ultimately answering two questions: "what constitutes a syntactic transformation" and "what constitutes a phonological transformation".;The discussion will, of course, have a slightly different focus in each of the two cases, owing to the history of research on the topics. There are a number of transformations which are uncontroversially assumed to take place during the overt syntactic computation. Hence the question of "what constitutes a syntactic transformation" will be discussed more abstractly, focusing on what syntactic transformations have in common; in other words, an investigation into their essential nature. By contrast, the question of "what constitutes a phonological transformation" will be answered more literally, by giving examples and demonstrating that, contrary to previous assumptions, the "displacements" do in fact take place during the computation from SPELL-OUT to the PF interface.