Shalom Lappin (SL3@soas.ac.uk)
Tue, 4 Nov 1997 12:00:28 GMT
Hi, David Johnson and I have just completed the draft of a new paper, "Local Constraints vs. Local Economy", in which we compare recently proposed models of local economy with pure local constraint grammars. We argue that there is no conceptual or empirical support for incorporating local economy principles into the linguistic theory. We also compare the relation between syntactic structure and interface representations in both global and local economy versions of the Minimalist Program (MP) on one hand, and local constraint/incremental correspondence theories on the other. We take HPSG as a paradigm of the latter framework, and we argue that it provides a more successful treatment of the expletive and raising structures which MP theorists have used to support economy principles. We conclude that the fact that these stuctures are acutely problematic for the MP is an artifact of the interface-final architecture which it imposes on grammar. These problems do not arise in an incremental correspondence framework like HPSG, where semantic and phonological representations are built up in strict parallelism with syntactic structure. An extended abstract of the paper, and gzipped ps and Word Perfect 5.2 files are available from the SOAS HPSG Ellipsis Project web site, URL http://semantics.soas.ac.uk/ellip. We welcome your comments and discussion. Regards. Shalom
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