Optimal design, imperfections, and dislocation |
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Przemys³aw
Tajsner (Poznañ) |
One of the current issues in the Minimalist Programme has been the
question of the optimal design of language faculty for meeting the requirements
of the external systems. A displacement property may be thought of in this
context as one of the imperfections, or conversely, part of the optimal design.
The paper, which discusses an instance of movement known as Object Shift (OS),
favours the latter position. Object Shift is considered here to be a
computational option operative in the formation of a structure legible for an
external system. Unlike in Chomsky (1999), I propose that OS is parametrically
driven by the presence of EPP in v*, and not by the parametric assignment of
the feature [INT] to a shifted object in Spec.of v*P. Some other issues raised
in the paper are the question of the autonomy of formal grammar in view of the
discussion of legibility conditions,
the interpretation of “external motivation” for narrow syntax, and the
status of optional rules.