Strict Deterministic Aspects of Minimalist Grammars

The Minimalist Grammars (MGs) proposed by Stabler(1997) have tree-shaped derivations (Harkema, 2001b; Michaelis, 2001a). As in categorial grammars, each lexical item is an association between a vocabulary element and complex of features, and so the “yields” or “fringes” of the derivation trees are sequences of these lexical items, and the string parts of these lexical items are reordered in the course of the derivation. This paper shows that while the derived string languages can be ambiguous and non-context-free, the set of yields of the derivation trees is always context-free and unambiguous. In fact, the derivation yield languages are strictly deterministic context-free languages, which implies that they are LR(0), and that the generation of derivation trees from a yield language string can be computed in linear time. This result suggests that the work of MG parsing consists essentially of guessing the lexical entries associated with words and empty categories.