Dependency Structures Derived from Minimalist Grammars
Marisa Ferrara Boston, John Hale, and Marco Kuhlmann. Dependency Structures Derived from Minimalist Grammars. In Christian Ebert, Gerhard Jäger, and Jens Michaelis, editors, The Mathematics of Language. 10th and 11th Biennial Conference, MOL 10, Los Angeles, CA, USA, July 28–30, 2007, and MOL 11, Bielefeld, Germany, August 20–21, 2009, Revised Selected Papers, volume 6149 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 1–12. Springer, 2010.
Abstract
This paper provides an interpretation of Minimalist Grammars (Stabler, 1997; Stabler & Keenan, 2003) in terms of dependency structures. Under this interpretation, merge operations derive projective dependency structures, and movement operations create both non-projective and illnested structures. This provides a new characterization of the generative capacity of Minimalist Grammar, and makes it possible to discuss the linguistic relevance of non-projectivity and illnestedness based on grammars that derive structures with these properties.