From Derivations to Outputs: Transfer in Minimalist Grammars

Things have been a little quiet on the Minimalist grammar front around here recently (February and March are paper writing season for me). But fortunately Greg Kobele whipped up an amazing intro to the MG conception of Transfer that you should all check out. It starts out with the very basics of Minimalist derivations, which I also discussed in two earlier posts. But then it moves to some really juicy material, namely how derivations can be mapped to surface strings and semantic interpretations without having to construct some kind of phrase structure tree first.

Two More Things about Minimalist Grammars

My intro post on Minimalist grammars garnered a lot more attention than I expected. People asked some damn fine questions, some of which I could not fully address in a single comment. So let's take a closer look at two technical issues before we move on to derivation trees next week (I swear, Norbert, we'll get to them soon).

Minimalist Grammars: The Very Basics

Oh boy, it's been a while... where did we leave off? Right, I got my panties in a twist over the fact that a lot of computational work does not get the attention it deserves. Unfortunately the post came across a lot whinier and accusatory than intended, so let's quickly recapitulate what I was trying to say.

Certain computational approaches (coincidentally those that I find most interesting) have a hard time reaching a more mainstream linguistic audience. Not because the world is a mean place where nobody likes math, but because 1) most results in this tradition are too far removed from concrete empirical phenomena to immediately pique the interest of the average linguist, and 2) there are very few intros for those linguists that are interested in formal work. This is clearly something we computational guys have to fix asap, and I left you with the promise that I would do my part by introducing you to some of the recent computational work that I find particularly interesting on a linguistic level.¹

I've got several topics lined up --- the role of derivations, the relation between syntax and phonology, island constraints, the advantages of a formal parsing model --- but all of those assume some basic familiarity with Minimalist grammars. So here's a very brief intro to MGs, which I'll link to in my future posts as a helpful reference for you guys. And just to make things a little bit more interesting, I've also thrown in some technical observations about the power of Move...