Tom Cornell:

    Feature-Checking Nets: Graphical Representations of Minimalist Derivations

    Abstract

    One can think of the requirements of feature checking in minimalist derivations as a way of pruning away unwanted trees that would otherwise be formed by Merge and Move. In this talk I will stand this perspective on its head, and consider Merge and Move as ways of pruning away unwanted linkings between features. That is, I will consider feature checking as in some sense the primary syntactic operation: given a numeration of lexical items, we want to place the features of these lexical item instances in checking relations in such a way that they are all used up. Then we will check to see if the result forms a representation of a convergent minimalist transformational derivation. While this way of doing things may appear to be exactly backwards, in fact it strongly resembles the construction of a proof net in linear logic or categorial grammar. In fact, purely geometric conditions standardly employed for proof nets in non- or partly-commutative linear logics turn out, when applied in a minimalist setting, to be closely related to linguistic well-formedness conditions on the multidominance structures which arise as the markers of a minimalist derivation.