An official website of the United States government
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.
more »
« less
Subregular Tree Transductions, Movement, Copies, Traces, and the Ban on Improper Movement
Extending prior work in Graf (2018, 2020, 2022c), I show that movement is tier-based strictly local (TSL) even if one analyzes it as a transformation, i.e. a tree transduction from derivation trees to output trees. I define input strictly local (ISL) tree-to-tree transductions with (lexical) TSL tests as a tier-based extension of ISL tree-to-tree transductions. TSL tests allow us to attach each mover to all its landing sites. In general, this class of transductions fails to attach each mover to its final landing site to the exclusion of all its intermediate landing sites, which is crucial for producing output trees with the correct string yield. The problem is avoided, though, if syntax enforces a variant of the Ban on Improper Movement. Subregular complexity thus provides a novel motivation for core restrictions on movement while also shedding new light on the choice between copies and traces in syntax.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1845344
- PAR ID:
- 10496687
- Publisher / Repository:
- University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
- ISSN:
- 2834-1007
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
The subregular approach has revealed that the phonological surface patterns found in natural language are much simpler than previously assumed. Most patterns belong to the subregular class of tier-based strictly local languages (TSL), which characterizes them as the combination of a strictly local dependency with a tier-projection mechanism that masks out irrelevant segments. Some non-TSL patterns have been pointed out in the literature, though. We show that these outliers can be captured by rendering the tier projection mechanism sensitive to the surrounding structure. We focus on a specific instance of these structure-sensitive TSL languages: input-local TSL (ITSL), in which the tier projection may distinguish between identical segments that occur in different local contexts in the input string. This generalization of TSL establishes a tight link between tier-based language classes and ISL transductions, and is motivated by several natural language phenomena.more » « less
-
Many long-distance linguistic dependencies across domains can be modeled as tier-based strictly local (TSL) patterns (Graf 2022a). Such patterns are in principle efficiently learnable, but known algorithms require unrealistic conditions. Heuser et al. (2024) present an algorithm for learning syntactic islands which involves memorizing local bigrams along attested paths; no tiers are involved. I propose a method for inferring tier membership which augments the latter algorithm to produce a TSL grammar, and show that this model also derives a version of the Height-Locality Connection (Keine 2019).more » « less
-
Graf and Mayer (2018) analyze the process of Sanskrit /n/-retroflexion (nati) from a subregular perspective. They show that nati, which might be the most complex phenomenon in segmental phonology, belongs to the class of input-output tier-based strictly local languages (IO-TSL). However, the generative capacity and linguistic relevance of IO-TSL is still largely unclear compared to other recent classes like the interval-based strictly piecewise languages (IBSP; Graf, 2017, 2018). This paper shows that IBSP has a much harder time capturing nati than IO-TSL, due to two major shortcomings: namely, the requirement of an upper bound on relevant segments, and a lack of descriptive succinctness.more » « less
-
Graf (2017) warns that every syntactic formalism faces a severe overgeneration problem because of the hidden power of subcategorization. Any constraint definable in monadic second-order logic can be compiled into the category system so that it is indirectly enforced as part of subcategorization. Not only does this kind of feature coding deprive syntactic proposals of their empirical bite, it also undermines computational efforts to limit syntactic formalisms via subregular complexity. This paper presents a subregular solution to feature coding. Instead of features being a cheap resource that comes for free, features must be assigned by a transduction. In particular, category features must be assigned by an input strictly local (ISL) tree-tot-tree transduction, defined here for the first time. The restriction to ISL transductions correctly rules out various deviant category systems.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.7275/tk1n-q855
