A Note on Countercyclicity and Minimalist Grammars

Minimalist grammars (MGs), as introduced in Stabler (1997), have proven a useful instrument in the formal analysis of syntactic theories developed within the minimalist branch of the principles–and–parameters framework (cf. Chomsky 1995, 2000). In fact, as shown in Michaelis (2001), MGs belong to the class of mildly context–sensitive grammars. Interestingly, without there being a rise in (at least weak) generative power, (extensions and variants of) MGs accommodate a wide variety of (arguably) “odd” items from the syntactician’s toolbox, such as head movement (Stabler 1997, 2001), affix hopping (Stabler 2001), (strict) remnant movement (Stabler 1997, 1999), adjunction (Frey and Gärtner 2002), and (to some extent) scrambling (Frey and Gärtner 2002).1 Here, we would like to explore the possibility of enriching MGs with another controversial mechanism, namely, countercyclic operations. These operations allow structure building at any node in the tree instead of just at the root.2 We will first discuss countercyclic adjunction, which has repeatedly been postulated in the syntactic literature, especially in analyses of binding phenomena (Section 8.2.1). Then we sketch an extension of MGs that captures countercyclic adjunction (Section 8.2.2). As further discussed in Section 8.2.3, it turns out that, while weak