Last time we attempted to provide an analysis of the English auxiliary system on methodological first principles. Instead of appealing to theoretical desiderata, such as having a fixed set of functional projections, in a certain order, etc, we began with whole words, and tried systematically to reduce redundancy in our analysis by means of our operation of lexical decomposition. Lexical decomposition is an operation on lexical items which splits one lexical item into two, by dividing its feature bundle into two parts, and giving one part to one, and the other part to the other.

In analysing the English auxiliary system, we have noticed a number of coöccurrence restrictions, summarized by the flowchart below. Figure 1: Depicting relations between lexical items for the English auxiliary system Reading this flowchart from left to right, we can see that it expresses the generalizations that: (present) tense and modals (will) are first, and in complementary distribution Next, perfective have may appear, if it does, then whatever is next will be in the perfective form (en) Next, progressive be may appear, if it does then whatever is next will be in the progressive form (ing) The flowchart notation will be used frequently in this post, and so I will explain how to interpret it in some detail.

In order to express the distribution of a word in a more satisfactory manner, I suggested that we could enrich our system of categories to allow us to fuse multiple lexical entries into a single one. I suggested as well that silent heads (empty lexical items) offered a different way of expressing generalizations, one which in some sense is an inverse to lexical fusion. In this post I want to begin exploring the content and role of silent lexical items.

The previous posts have introduced a formalism in which we may write minimalist analyses. The formalism actually provides a system for constructing links between lexical items, which while initially unfamiliar, are actually equivalent (intertranslatable) with the structures involving movement that we normally use. While links between lexical items could in principle be drawn in many ways (e.g. ‘if your graph has a prime number of nodes, draw a link between two at random’), the system we have been exploring lexicalizes the link drawing procedure, by putting features on lexical items.

In the previous post, I said that [attaching] linearization instructions to the individual features [..] contaminates the representation, combining true syntactic and merely interface information To allay any confusion: I do not see this ‘representational contamination’ as a ‘real’ problem. It is simply notation. However, notation seems to have an ability to confuse humans, as we tend to confuse notation with some underlying reality. It is also sometimes useful for purposes of understanding to be able to cleanly separate different kinds of information in a representation.