A minimal deductive system for minimalism

This paper proposes to answer some questions concerning economy in computation and language by giving a very compact set of deductive rules (based on the so-called Lambek calculus, enriched with an exchange modality) which embodies all the properties of Minimalist Grammars (Stabler, 15]). move is replaced by a logical operation, very similar in its eeects to Form Chain, technically known as the product-elimination rule, which inserts a lexical or syntactic object at (at least) two positions at the same time. Non commutativity of the system ensures HMC. Moreover the precise formulation of the system enables us to show what kinds of languages can be captured and it is then an empirical question to verify that some natural languages exist, which present similarities with them. We can therefore say that formalization leads to a hypothetico-deductive approach in linguistics.