MIT Press& MIT Working Papers in Linguistics When is Less More Faithfulness and Minimal Li

发布时间：2011-07-18 13:35:40

Our thanks to Kristin Homer and William Raymond, members of our research group *at Colorado; to Joseph Aoun, Luigi Burzio, Robert Frank, Jane Grimshaw, David Pesetsky and Alan Prince, for extremely helpful conversations; to audiences at Arizona, Brown, Cornell,Delaware, Georgetown, Hopkins, Maryland, UCLA, USC, and the MIT conference, for stimulating ideas and questions. For partial financial support, we gratefully acknowledge NSF grant BS-9209265, and then NSF grant IRI-9213894, both to Smolensky and Legendre; and the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins.A chain C is ‘longer than’ chain C N if the longest link in C is ‘longer than’ the 1longest link in C N , in a precise sense defined below. In all the examples in (1), M IN L INK interacts crucially with other constraints which also figure in the complete explanations; these are developed below.To appear in Proceedings of the Workshop on Optimality in SyntaxMIT Press & MIT Working Papers in LinguisticsWhen is Less More?Faithfulness and Minimal Links in wh-Chains *Géraldine Legendre, Paul Smolensky, & Colin WilsonDepartment of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University1. IntroductionIt is an attractive prospect to explain and unify a broad spectrum of locality effects in syntax through a principle requiring that movements, or chain links, or dependencies,be as short as possible. But a formalization of such a principle faces great challenges,the most fundamental of which is a proper treatment of the comparative computation inherent in the qualifier ‘as possible.’ A grammatical framework for formalizing such comparative principles is provided by Optimality Theory (‘OT’; Prince & Smolensky 1991, 1993), and our goal in this work is to explore the explanatory power of general comparative constraints in syntax like ‘Shortest Link’ (e.g., Chomsky 1992) when they are formalized within OT. More specifically, our goal in this paper is a formalization of ‘Shortest Link’, which we will call M IN L INK , which is simultaneously flexible enough to accomodate the broad cross-linguistic variation in extraction patterns, and strong enough to do the primary work in a wide variety of explanations, including the following general types :1(1) a.*S (sentence S is ungrammatical) because a chain C in S is longer thani the corresponding chain C N in a competing structure S N with the same LFi representation (e.g., super-raising).b.*S because a link of a chain C in S is longer than any in a correspondingi chain C N in a competing structure S N with a different LF representationi (e.g., wh-islands).c.*S because a chain C in S is longer than the chain of a different elementi C N in a competitor S N (e.g., superiority).j d.*S because S has an A N -chain C while a competing structure S N has noi A N -chain for that element. (e.g., strong islands).

MIT Press& MIT Working Papers in Linguistics When is Less More Faithfulness and Minimal Li

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