I think that the essence of syntax proper is linking lexical items together in various ways. In the last post I tried to show that the dependency structures we obtain by linking lexical features together just are the tree-like structures with movement we are familiar with, disguised. I think this is important, because it reveals grammaticality to be verifying that features of lexical items were checked off against each other in the right way, which is different from how we usually think of things.

We have formulated the ‘essence of syntax’ as constructing dependencies between heads, and we have implemented it in terms of feature checking. At the end of the day, we end up with a dependency structure (a rooted acyclic graph over heads). Although the way I specified this dependency structure was via a derivation, a little thought might lead you to suspect that we could have just said, a well-formed dependency structure is one that looks like this (with the ‘this’ being some statement about the final dependency structure), and in fact, this is true.

This is a short post for labor day I wanted to elevate a concern raised in the comments to a post.

As all agreement (perhaps modulo cases of Suffixaufnahme) is of finitely many finite valued features, we can simply introduce one lexical item for each feature combination, and adjust our formal features accordingly. This is the checking theory of (Chomsky 95), whereby lexical items have fully fleshed out morphological features, and they must be checked by other (agreement) heads with matching features.

Chomsky has said repeatedly that minimalism is a program, and not a theory. The intent is to emphasize that there is a coherent research program, which is independent of any particular instantiation of it. Thus it makes perfect sense to have Cinque-style Cartography coexist alongside the more spare Chomskyian V-v-T-C clausal backbone; both can be different (perhaps incompatible) instantiations of the same general research program. Indeed, there are innumerable (sometimes slight) variations of theories in the minimalist vein.

The basic perspective I want to adopt in this class is one of discovery. Both linguists analyzing and children learning a language are engaged in the process of discovering structure.