Primitive computations in phrase construction

Abstract

The Minimalist Program in current linguistic theory seeks to explain linguistic structure in terms of economy principles, under the assumption that the human language faculty is a perfect system that performs only enough work to satisfy interface requirements. We consider processing costs as a property of syntactic computation and propose that these principles of economy may be met by the availability of alternative operations, each favorable in different circumstances. We characterize the basic Merge operation as a collection of three nested operations that apply to three corresponding levels of nested syntactic data types. In this framework, we provide an analysis of coordinate structure that uses a goal of minimizing processing cost to explain a number of peculiar characteristics of coordination, including the Coordination of Likes Constraint, the Coordinate Structure Constraint, and apparent case and agreement violations.