| Chomsky's 1994, 1995a, 1995b conception of a "Minimalist Program" recommends a rethinking of the fundaments of linguistic theory, recasting its essential and "conceptually necessary" elements in the simplest terms possible, and examining how far such a stripped-down approach can take us in creating empirically adequate theories of human language.;In his work on the nature of c-command, a relation between categories in a syntactic structure that has proven pervasive in syntactic theory, Epstein 1994, 1995 argues that the apparently arbitrary definition of c-command emerges naturally in the syntactic computational system if we take seriously the idea that syntactic-structure is formed by successive applications of structure-building rules (Merge and Move, following Chomsky 1995a, 1995b) that concatenate syntactic objects to form new objects. Thus c-command is a natural property not of a syntactic structure, but of the derivation of that structure.;This thesis extends Epstein's idea to another pervasive relation: the local relation of checking, heavily implicated in current approaches to movement. I argue that local relations are in fact nothing more than a subset of the c-command relations, being cases of mutual c-command within a derivation. This derivational construal of local relations carries with it certain properties that automatically account for numerous heretofore stipulated properties of the syntactic component of Universal Grammar, including aspects of structure-building such as binary branching, the Spec-Head relation as a checking relation, difficulties with X-bar invisibility, constraints on downwards and sidewards movement, strict cyclicity in the overt syntax, trace theory and the head-parameter. Further proposals examine the status of expletives and economy under this framework.;The thesis constitutes a subtle but significant shift in the architecture of the grammar. Nearly every aspect of syntactic theory ultimately needs to be rethought and reformulated under this approach, which serves largely to entertain conceptual advantages of its minimalist character. Hence it is more properly construed as a program for syntactic theory than as a theory of syntax. |
