• Gregory Kobele & Jens Michaelis. Two Type 0-Variants of Minimalist Grammars. Paper presented at FG-MoL 2005, Edinburgh, August 5-7, 2005. Appeared in J. Rogers (ed.), Proceedings of FG-MoL 2005. The 10th conference on Formal Grammar and The 9th Meeting on Mathematics of Language, pp. 81-91, CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA, 2009. Published within the CSLI Publications Online Proceedings series of FG Conferences.

Abstract

Minimalist grammars (Stabler 1997) capture some essential ideas about the basic operations of sentence construction in the Chomskyian syntactic tradition. Their affinity with the unformalized theories of working linguists makes it easier to implement and thereby to better understand the operations appealed to in neatly accounting for some of the regularities perceived in language. Here we characterize the expressive power of two, apparently quite different, variations on the basic minimalist grammar framework, gotten by:

1. adding a mechanism of `feature percolation' (Kobele, forthcoming), or

2. instead of adding a central constraint on movement (the `specifier island condition', Stabler 1999), using it to replace another one (the `shortest move condition', Stabler 1997, 1999) (Gärtner & Michaelis 2005).

We demonstrate that both variants have equal, unbounded, computing power by showing how each can simulate straightforwardly a 2-counter automaton.

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