• Jens Michaelis. Some Formal Implications of a Revised Perspective on Minimalist Grammars. Draft, Potsdam University, 2001. An extended and somewhat updated version is provided by Michaelis 2002, Implications of a Revised Perspective on Minimalist Grammars.

Abstract

The type of a minimalist grammar (MG) as introduced by Stabler (1997) provides an attempt of a rigorous formalization of the perspectives adopted nowadays within the linguistic framework of transformational grammar. As shown in Michaelis 1998, MGs expose a class of so-called mildly context-sensitive grammars in the sense that for each MG there is a weakly equivalent multiple context-free grammar (MCFG) in the sense of Seki et al. 1991. Recently, independent work of Harkema (2001) and Michaelis (2001b) has proven the reverse to be true, as well. Hence, crucially, MGs as defined in Stabler 1997 join to a series of formalism classes (among which there is e.g. the class of deterministic tree-walking transducers) all generating the same class of string languages. Mainly inspired by the linguistic work presented in Koopman & Szabolcsi 2000, in Stabler 1999 a restricted type of an MG has been proposed which departure from the version in Stabler 1997 is twofold: the revised type does not employ any longer any kind of so-called head movement as well as covert (phrasal) movement, and some further restrictions are imposed on the move-operator as to which subtree of a given tree may move overtly into another position. Employing and extending the methods developed in Michaelis 1998, this paper shows that, in terms of derivable string languages, the revised MG-type is not only subsumed by MCFGs, but also falls within a particular subclass of the latter. This result is in fact of interest, since it can be shown that, in terms of weak equivalence, the class of revised MGs conversely subsumes the corresponding MCFG-subclass (Michaelis 2001a). Whether the respective classes of string languages derivable by the corresponding MCFG-subclass and the class of all MCFGs are identical seems to be an open problem.

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