Paper

Typological Implications of Tier-Based Strictly Local Movement

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Abstract

Earlier work has shown that movement, which forms the backbone of Minimalist syntax, belongs in the subregular class of TSL-2 dependencies over trees. The central idea is that movement, albeit unbounded, boils down to local mother-daughter dependencies on a specific substructure called a tree tier. This reveals interesting parallels between syntax and phonology, but it also looks very different from the standard view of movement. One may wonder, then, whether the TSL-2 characterization is linguistically natural. I argue that this is indeed the case because TSL-2 furnishes a unified analysis of a variety of phenomena: multiple wh-movement, expletive constructions, the that-trace effect and the anti-that-trace effect, islands, and wh-agreement. In addition, TSL-2 explains the absence of many logically feasible yet unattested phenomena. Far from a mere mathematical curiosity, TSL-2 is a conceptually pleasing and empirically fertile characterization of movement.

Keywords: computational syntax, subregular complexity, tier-based strictly local, Minimalist grammars, that-trace effect, islands, wh-agreement

How to Cite:

Graf, T., (2022) “Typological Implications of Tier-Based Strictly Local Movement”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 5(1), 184-193. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/gb65-ht31