Learning Mirror Theory

Mirror Theory is a syntactic framework developed in (Brody, 1997), where it is offered as a consequence of eliminating purported redundancies in Chomsky’s minimalism (Chomsky, 1995). A fundamental feature of Mirror Theory is its requirement that the syntactic head-complement relation mirror certain morphological relations (such as constituency). This requirement constrains the types of syntactic structures that can express a given phrase; the morphological constituency of the phrase determines part of the syntactic constituency, thereby ruling out other, weakly equivalent, alternatives. A less fundamental, but superficially very noticeable feature is the elimination of phrasal projection. Thus the X-bar structure on the left becomes the mirror theoretic structure on the right: