Some Remarks on Locality Conditions and Minimalist Grammars

In this paper we undertake a study of syntactic locality conditions (LCs) within Stablerian minimalist grammars (MGs) (Stabler 1997, 1998, 1999 and elsewhere). We show that the “restrictiveness” of LCs measured in terms of weak generative capacity depends on how they are combined. Thus, standard MGs incorporating just the shortest move condition (SMC) are mildly contextsensitive. Adding the specifier island condition (SPIC) to such grammars either reduces complexity or, interestingly, it increases complexity. This depends on the co-presence or absence of the SMC, respectively. Likewise, the effect of adding the adjunct island condition (AIC) to an extended MG is either trivial (without co-presence of the SMC) or, apparently, crucial in preserving mild context-sensitivity. The point of this exercise is to demonstrate that LCs as such intuitions to the contrary notwithstanding are not automatically restrictive where a formal notion of restrictiveness is applied. Independent motivation for our work comes from a recent convergence of two research trends. On the one hand, appeal has been made to the formal complexity of natural languages in work on language evolution (Hauser et al. 2002, PiattelliPalmarini and Uriagereka 2004) and to computational efficiency in mainstream minimalism (Chomsky 2005). On the other hand, the formally well-understood Stablerian MGs provide enough descriptive flexibility to be taken seriously as a syntactic theory by the working linguist. A more comprehensive study of the complexity of constraint interaction is still outstanding.