• Makoto Kanazawa, Jens Michaelis, Sylvain Salvati & Ryo Yoshinaka. Well-Nestedness Properly Subsumes Strict Derivational Minimalism. Paper to be presented at the conference Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics (LACL 2011), Montpellier, June 29-July 2, 2011. Revised version appeared in: S. Pogodalla and J.-P. Prost (eds.), Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics, LNCS/LNAI Vol. 6736, pp. 112-128, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011.

Abstract

Minimalist grammars (MGs) constitute a mildly context-sensitive formalism when being equipped with a particular locality condition (LC), the shortest move condition. In this format MGs define the same class of derivable string languages as multiple context-free grammars (MCFGs). Adding another LC to MGs, the specifier island condition (SPIC), results in a proper subclass of derivable languages. It is rather straightforward to see this class is embedded within the class of languages derivable by some well-nested MCFG (MCFG-wn). In this paper we show that the embedding is even proper. We partially do so adapting the methods used in Kanazawa & Salvati 2010 to characterize the separation of MCFG-wn-languages from MCFG-languages by means of a "simple copying" theorem. The separation of strict derivational minimalism from well-nested MCFGs is then characterized by means of a "simple reverse copying" theorem. Since for MGs, well-nestedness seems to be a rather ad hoc restriction, whereas for MCFGs, this holds regarding the SPIC, our result may suggest we are concerned here with a structural difference between MGs and MCFGs which cannot immediately be overcome in a non-stipulated manner.

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