Derivational and Representational Views of Minimalist Transformational Grammar

摘要

In this paper we cast the long-standing debate in transformational grammar over movement derivations vs. well-formedness conditions on chains in a new light. We claim that the argument itself is misguided: a transformational grammar should have both a derivational and representational interpretation, connected by soundness and completeness results. Second, we argue that the proper form of the representational interpretation is as an axiomatization of T-markers rather than P-markers (e.g., LF structures). Little of significance in representation-alist approaches is lost by this move, however. Antecedent goverment conditions on chains, for example, can still be easily stated in terms of the kinds of T-markers that we propose. Many well-known problems for representational approaches are avoided, however. In addition, from a derivational perspective, global constraints on derivations become simple structural well-formedness conditions on T-markers. We offer a rigorous formalization of a simple system of T-markers and show its equivalence to a simple minimalist derivation system.