Evaluating syntactic proposals using minimalist grammars and minimum description length

Many patterns found in natural language syntax have multiple pos-sible explanations or structural descriptions. Even within the cur-rently dominant Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995, 2000), it is not uncommon to encounter multiple types of analyses for the same phenomenon proposed in the literature. A natural question, then, is whether one could evaluate and compare syntactic proposals from a quantitative point of view. In this paper, we show how an evaluation measure inspired by the minimum description length principle (Rissa-nen 1978) can be used to compare accounts of syntactic phenomena implemented as minimalist grammars (Stabler 1997), and how argu-ments for and against this kind of analysis translate into quantitative differences

Graph Theory and Universal Grammar

Tese arquivada ao abrigo da Portaria nº 227/2017 de 25 de Julho-Registo de Grau EstrangeiroIn the last few years, Noam Chomsky (1994; 1995; 2000; 2001) has gone quite far in the direction of simplifying syntax, including eliminating X-bar theory and the levels of D-structure and S-structure entirely, as well as reducing movement rules to a combination of the more primitive operations of Copy and Merge. What remain in the Minimalist Program are the operations Merge and Agree and the levels of LF (Logical Form) and PF (Phonological form). My doctoral thesis attempts to offer an economical theory of syntactic structure from a graph-theoretic point of view (cf. Diestel, 2005), with special emphases on the elimination of category and projection labels and the Inclusiveness Condition (Chomsky 1994). The major influences for the development of such a theory have been Chris Collins’ (2002) seminal paper “Eliminating labels”, John Bowers (2001) unpublished manuscript “Syntactic Relations” and the Cartographic Paradigm (see Belletti, Cinque and Rizzi’s volumes on OUP for a starting point regarding this paradigm). A syntactic structure will be regarded here as a graph consisting of the set of lexical items, the set of relations among them and nothing more

Formalizing mirror theory

Mirror Theory is a syntactic framework developed in (Brody, 1997), where it is offered as a consequence of eliminating purported redundancies in Chomsky’s minimalism (Chomsky, 1995). A fundamental feature of Mirror Theory is its requirement that the syntactic head-complement relation mirror certain morphological relations (such as constituency). This requirement constrains the types of syntactic structures that can express a given phrase; the morphological constituency of the phrase determines part of the syntactic constituency, thereby ruling out other, weakly equivalent, alternatives. A less fundamental, but superficially very noticeable feature is the elimination of phrasal projection. Thus the X-bar structure on the left becomes the mirror theoretic structure on the right