Even though Minimalist grammars are more powerful than TAG on the string level, the classes of tree languages the two define are incomparable. I give a constructive proof that if the standard Move operation in Minimalist grammars is replaced by Reset Lowering, every TAG tree language can be generated. The opposite does not hold, so the strong generative capacity of Minimalist grammars with Rese...

Despite the growing interest in minimalist shoes, no studies have compared the efficacy of different types of minimalist shoe models in reproducing barefoot running patterns and in eliciting biomechanical changes that make them differ from standard cushioned running shoes. The aim of this study was to investigate the acute effects of different footwear models, marketed as "minimalist" by their ...

In Sayeed and Szpakowicz (2004), we proposed a parser inspired by some aspects of the Minimalist Program. This incremental parser was designed specifically to handle discontinuous constituency phenomena for NPs in Latin. We take a look at the application of this parser to a specific kind of apparent island violation in Latin involving the extraction of constituents, including subjects, from ten...

Default case appears when a DP cannot get case through normal syntactic mechanisms (Schütze 2001). In an OT system, default case is best analyzed as an example of emergence of the unmarked. When case cannot be assigned, the least marked case is used. A constraint system is developed that includes markedness constraints for assigning structural case and faithfulness constraints for assigning non...

Such a process is at first sight problematic for the Minimalist program (Chomsky 1992) where optional operations are not countenanced. Under this program, syntactic operations are forced by morphological checking requirements. Assume that in (2) the subject has moved from a position corresponding to its position in (1). Then Minimalism predicts that (2) is well formed only if the subject has mo...

Hornstein (1999, 2001) proposes a particular version of the movement theory of control (MTC) in which movement is driven by the need of a DP to “receive” a θ-feature from the predicate it merges with. I argue here against the use of θ-features in syntax on various grounds, the most important of which is that, being fundamentally semantic in nature, they belong properly to the bare output condit...

We define a generative model for a minimalist grammar formalism. We present a generalized algorithm for the application of variational bayesian inference to lexicalized mildly context sensitive grammars. We apply this algorithm to the minimalist grammar model.

BACKGROUND While minimalist running shoes may have an influence on running biomechanics and on the incidence of overuse injuries, the term "minimalist" is currently used without standardisation. The objectives of this study were to reach a consensus on a standard definition of minimalist running shoes, and to develop and validate a rating scale that could be used to determine the degree of mini...