<i>Spell-Out and the Minimalist Program</i>

Leveraging the open source ispell codebase for minority language analysis

The ispell family of spellcheckers is perhaps the single most widely ported and deployed open-source language tool. Here we describe how the SzóSzablya ‘WordSword’ project leverages ispell’s Hungarian descendant, HunSpell, to create a whole set of related tools that tackle a wide range of low-level NLP-related tasks such as character set normalization, language detection, spellchecking, stemmin...

The Minimalist Impulse1

The Minimalist Program

The Minimalist Program, by Noam Chomsky, is a collection of four articles, ‘The Theory of Principles and Parameters ’ (written with Howard Lasnik, –), ‘Some notes on Economy of Derivation and representation’ (–), ‘A Minimalist Program for linguistic theory’ (–), and ‘Categories and transformations’ (–). The first three articles have appeared elsewhere, and are reprinted h...

Adjuncts and Minimalist Grammars

The behaviour of adverbs and adjectives has qualities of both ordinary selection and something else, something unique to modifiers. This makes them difficult to model. Modifiers are generally optional and transparent to selection while arguments are required and driven by selection. Cinque [4] proposes that adverbs, functional heads, and descriptive adjectives are underlyingly uniformly ordered...

Minimalist grammars and recognition

Abstract Recent work has shown how basic ideas of the minimalist tradition in transformational syntax can be captured in a simple generative formalism, a “derivational minimalism.” This framework can model “remnant movement” analyses, which yield more complex antecedent-trace relations, suggesting a new and significant sense in which linguistic structures are “chain based.” Michaelis (1998) sho...