• Gregory Kobele & Jens Michaelis. Disentangling Notions of Specifier Impenetrability: Late Adjunction, Islands, and Expressive Power. Paper presented at the 12th Meeting on Mathematics of Language (MOL 12), Nara, September 6-8, 2011. Revised version appeared in: M. Kanazawa, A. Kornai, M. Kracht & H. Seki (eds.), The Mathematics of Language, LNCS/LNAI Vol. 6878, pp. 126-142, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2011.

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the weak generative capacity of minimalist grammars with late adjunction. We show that by viewing the specifier island condition (SPIC) as the union of three separate constraints, we obtain a more nuanced perspective on previous results on constraint interaction in minimalist grammars, as well as the beginning of a map of the interaction between late adjunction and movement constraints. Our main result is that minimalist grammars with the SPIC on movement generated specifiers only and with the shortest move constraint, in conjunction with late adjunction, can define languages whose intersection with an appropriate regular language is not semilinear.

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