Syntactic Codes and Grammar Refinement

We call syntactic coding a technique which converts syntactic principles or constraints on representations into grammatical rules which can be implemented in any given rule grammar. In this paper we show that any principle or constraint on output trees formalizable in a certain fragment of dynamic logic over trees can be coded in this sense. This allows to reduce in a mechanical fashion most of the current theories of government and binding into gpsg-style grammars. This will be exemplified with Rizzi’s Relativized Minimality.