Hans Broekhuis

This chapter will motivate why it is useful to consider the topic of derivations and fi ltering in more detail. We will argue against the popular belief that the minimalist program and optimality theory are incompatible theories in that the former places the explanatory burden on the generative device (the computational system CHL) whereas the latter places it on the fi ltering device (the OT evaluator). Although this belief may be correct in as far as it describes existing tendencies, we will argue that minimalist and optimality theoretic approaches normally adopt more or less the same global architecture of grammar: both assume that a generator defi nes a set S of potentially well-formed expressions that can be generated on the basis of a given input and that there is an evaluator that selects the expressions from S that are actually grammatical in a given language L. For this reason, we believe that it has a high priority to investigate the role of the two components in more detail in the hope that this will provide a better understanding of the differences and similarities between the two approaches. We will conclude this introduction with a brief review of the studies collected in this book. 1. The architecture of grammar The studies collected in this book all discuss the relation between the generative and the fi lter component of the grammar. The focus will be on syntax although the collection also contains a contribution by John J. McCarthy and Kathryn Pruitt, which discusses the issue for phonology. The starting point of this book is the popular view that current generative theories differ considerably in where they place the burden of explanation: whereas minimalist approaches generally assume that this is the generative component (the computational system CHL), optimality-theoretic approaches generally focus on the fi lter component (the OT-evaluator). This difference between the minimalist program (MP) and optimality theory (OT) is also refl ected in the claims that are normally made about the output of the generator; * Hans Broekhuis, Meertens Institute, P.O.-box 94264, 1090 GG Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected] ** Ralf Vogel, Universität Bielefeld, Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft, P.O.-Box 10 01 31, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]) 2 Hans Broekhuis and Ralf Vogel minimalist approaches normally presuppose that the output of CHL is small and may in fact be restricted to a single representation in many cases; optimality-theoretic approaches, on the other hand, normally maintain that the generator creates a candidate set that is very large or even infi nite. It is important to note, however, that proponents of MP normally accept the idea that the generator may overgenerate and that we must therefore assume additional means to fi lter out the unwanted structures from the reference set. This means that many proponents of MP and OT do agree that the global architecture of grammar has the form in Figure 1.1, where the Generator and the Evaluator can be held responsible for respectively the universal and languagespecifi c properties of languages. The essential property of this model is that the generator defi nes a set S of potentially well-formed expressions that can be generated on the basis of a given input, and that the evaluator selects those expressions from S that are actually grammatical in a given language L. This general id ea is, of course, not new and has already been formulated by Chomsky and Lasnik in ‘Filters and control’ (1977), where it is argued that ‘to attain explanatory adequacy it is in general necessary to restrict the class of possible grammars, whereas the pursuit of descriptive adequacy often seems to require elaborating the mechanisms available and thus extending the class of possible grammars’. In order to solve this tension they propose that ‘there is a theory of core grammar with highly restricted options, limited expressive power, and a few parameters’ next to a more peripheral system of ‘added properties of grammar’, which ‘we may think of as the syntactic analogue of irregular verbs’. Chomsky and Lasnik assume that core grammar consists of the phrase structure and transformational rules (the generator in Figure 1.1), whereas the more peripheral system consists of language-specifi c surface fi lters (the evaluator), and claim that the introduction of these fi lters contributes to the simplifi cation of the transformational rules by bearing ‘the burden of accounting for constraints which, in the earlier and far richer theory, were expressed in statements of ordering and obligatoriness, as well as all contextual dependencies that cannot be formulated in the narrower framework of core grammar’. The ideas about which aspects of grammar should be considered part of core grammar or part of the periphery have, of course, considerably changed over the years; the that-trace fi lter, for example, was originally proposed as a languagespecifi c fi lter for English, but the Empty Category Principle, which ultimately grew out of it, was assumed to be part of core grammar. Nevertheless, the gist of the proposal has survived in the more recent minimalist incarnations of the theory, where core syntax can be more or less equated with CHL, and the periphery with the interface conditions. The task of reducing core grammar as much as possible has been very successful: the reduction of CHL to its absolute minimum (internal and external merge) much contributes to the explanatory adequacy of the theory in the technical Input Evaluator Optimal output Output representations Generator Figure 1.1 The architecture of grammar.