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) showed that these grammars correspond to a certain kind of linear context free rewrite system, and this paper takes the next step of adapting the recognition methods for “non-concatenative” grammars (Weir, 1988; Seki et al., 1991; Boullier, 1999). This turns out to be quite straightforward once the grammars are set out appropriately.