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unpublished manuscript “Syntactic Relations” and the Cartographic Paradigm (see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
