A Note on the Complexity of Constraint Interaction: Locality Conditions and Minimalist Grammars

Locality Conditions (LCs) on (unbounded) dependencies have played a major role in the development of generative syntax ever since the seminal work by Ross [22]. Descriptively, they fall into two groups. On the one hand there are intervention-based LCs (ILCs) often formulated as “minimality constraints” (“minimal link condition,” “minimize chain links,”“shortest move,”“attract closest,” etc.). On the other hand there are containment-based LCs (CLCs) typically defined in terms of (generalized) grammatical functions (“adjunct island,”“subject island,”“specifier island,” etc.). Research on LCs has been dominated by two very general trends. First, attempts have been made at unifying ILCs and CLCs on the basis of notions such as “government” and “barrier” (e.g. [4]). Secondly, research has often been guided by the intuition that, beyond empirical coverage, LCs somehow contribute to restricting the formal capacity of grammars (cf. [3, p. 125], [6, p. ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: LACL
• Authors: Hans-Martin Gärtner, Jens Michaelis
• Keywords: Chain Links, Intervention-based Lcs, LACL 2005, Minimal Link Condition, Natural Language Processing