• Jens Michaelis. An Additional Observation on Strict Derivational Minimalism. 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. 101-111, CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA, 2009. Published within the CSLI Publications Online Proceedings series of FG Conferences.

Abstract

We answer a question which, so far, was left an open problem: does --- in terms of derivable string languages ---- the type of a minimalist grammar (MG) as originally introduced in Stabler 1997 define a proper superclass of the revised type of an MG and, therefore, the type of a strict MG both introduced in Stabler 1999, and known to be weakly equivalent? For both the revised as well as the strict MG-type, the essential difference to the original MG-definition consists in imposing --- in addition to the corresponding implementation of the shortest move condition --- a second condition on the move-operator providing a formulation of the specifier island condition, and as such, restricting (further) the domain to which the operator can apply. It has been known already that this additional condition, in fact, ensures that --- in terms of derivable string languages --- the revised and, therefore, the strict MG-type both constitute a subclass of the original MG-type. We here present a string language proving that the inclusion is proper.

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