The research of the last four decades suggests strongly that abstract laws of significant generality underlie much of the superficial complexity of human language. Evidence in favor of this conjecture comes from two different types of facts. First, there are cross-linguistic facts. Investigation of unfamiliar and typologically diverse languages is regularly illuminated by what we already know about other

A basic idea of the transformational tradition is that constituents move. More recently, there has been a trend towards the view that all features are lexical features. And in recent "minimalist" grammars, structure building operations are assumed to be feature driven. A simple grammar formalism with these properties is presented here and briefly explored. Grammars in this formalism can define languages that are not in the "mildly context sensitive" class defined by Vijay-Shanker and Weir (1994).

It is a familiar lesson from physical theory that interactions yield an important probe into structure. In the experiments of Rutherford almost 90 years ago, bits of matter were projected together; the physical properties of their interactions yielded evidence for a nucleus, hidden in the heart of atom. In semantics, the results of Donald Davidson in a famous 1967 paper might be viewed in a similar (although perhaps less dramatic) light. Davidson proposed that when we combine verbs and adverbs together, the logical properties of that interaction yield evidence for a semantic nucleus in the heart of the clause- an event argument. In recent years, the consequences of Davidson’s "discovery " have been elaborated by a number of different researchers across a variety of linguistic domains. In this paper I want to suggest a further area of elaboration. Specifically, I will propose that interactions between nouns and adjectives yield evidence for an event argument inside the nominal as well. Furthermore, this position seems to exist in both of the nominal projections countenanced by current linguistic theory: DP and NP. Postulating this element sheds light, I believe, on some well-known facts of

Abstract not found

Abstract not found

I will be concerned in this paper with the mechanisms by which apparently non-local Ā-connections, such as in (1), are established:* (1) He’s the guy that they said they thought they wanted to hire –. If locality conditions are at the heart of syntax (as increasingly seems to be the case), then the existence of apparently unbounded dependencies like that in (1) represents an anomaly. Since Chomsky (1973) it has come to be widely believed that the apparently distant connection between antecedent and variable position in such cases is in fact mediated by a sequence of more local connections—on one interpretation at least, a sequence of relatively local movements accessing successively higher left-peripheral positions between the variable position and the ultimate binder of that variable position. In all variants of this core idea, the specifier position of CP is one of the crucial left-peripheral positions in establishing these connections (in many variants it is the only such position). Thus, the derivation of (1) can be schematized as in (2):

Contents 1 Language Complexity in Generative Grammar 3 Part I The Descriptive Complexity of Strongly Context-Free Languages 11 2 Introduction to Part I 13 3 Trees as Elementary Structures 15 4 L 2 K;P and SnS 25 5 Definability and Non-Definability in L 2 K;P 35 6 Conclusion of Part I 57 DRAFT 2 / Contents Part II The Generative Capacity of GB Theories 59 7 Introduction to Part II 61 8 The Fundamental Structures of GB Theories 69 9 GB and Non-definability in L 2 K;P 79 10 Formalizing X-Bar Theory 93 11 The Lexicon, Subcategorization, Theta-theory, and Case Theory 111 12 Binding and Control 119 13 Chains 131 14 Reconstruction 157 15 Limitations of the Interpretation 173 16 Conclusion of Part II 179 A Index of Definitions 183 Bibliography DRAFT 1<

The position in which an argument is projected is usually assumed to be determined strictly by conditions of the computational system (X-bar theory) and the LF interface (Θ-theory). We will argue that these systems, although they obviously restrict the distribution of arguments, still allow in many cases a range of positions in which a given argument can be generated (merged). In the structures we will consider here, the choice between these is made,

this article.

We provide first-order axioms for the theories of finite trees with bounded branching and finite trees with arbitrary (finite) branching. The signature is chosen to express, in a natural way, those properties of trees most relevant to linguistic theories. These axioms provide a foundation for results in linguistics that are based on reasoning formally about such properties. We include some observations on the expressive power of these theories relative to traditional language complexity classes.