Phrase Structure in Minimalist Syntax

PHRASE STRUCTURE IN MINIMALIST SYNTAX by

This thesis is a study of clause architecture within a theory of generative grammar. It discusses four major syntactic hypotheses that have crucial bearing on the design of phrase structure: the Agreement-based Case theory, the internal subject hypothesis (ISH), the uniform three-level X-bar theory, and a hypothesis about string vacuous head movement. In Chapter 2 through Chapter 4, I discuss o...

Late Adjunction and Minimalist Phrase Structure

An algorithm of phrase structure building is proposed within the bare phrase structure framework. The algorithm is rooted in the idea that applications of Merge -the operation that combines syntactic objects -should not change the set of basic relations (in particular, c-command) in the existing structure, what Chomsky (2000) terms 'Least Tampering'. Under the proposed algorithm, this idea tran...

Minimalist variability in the verb phrase*

This paper discusses language variation from a minimalist perspective. Building on work from MacDonald (2006, 2008a,b), I discuss a clustering of inner aspectual properties from English eventive predicates, which Russian lacks. Interestingly, English statives also lack this cluster. I offer an account for the presence vs. absence of this aspectual cluster in terms of the presence vs. absence of...

An Experiment in Minimalist Experimental Syntax

How seriously should we take Minimalist syntax?

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