Local and Transderivational Constraints in Syntax and Semantics
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UNIVERSITYOF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Local and Transderivational Constraints in Syntax and Semantics A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics by Thomas Graf 2013 c Copyright by Thomas Graf 2013 ABSTRACTOFTHE DISSERTATION Local and Transderivational Constraints in Syntax and Semantics by Thomas Graf Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 Professor Edward P.Stabler, Chair A long-standing tension in Minimalist syntax is that between the structure-building operations Merge and Move on the one hand and the constraints restricting the shape of the structures built by said operations on the other. Proposals differ vastly in how much weight they attribute to each component, partially because there seems to be no principled connection between the two — constraints can easily be grafted onto any syntactic theory, and the choice of constraints is apparently independent of the types of posited operations. As a consequence, many foundational questions still lack satisfying answers: What kinds of constraints are there? What is their respective power, and are there any factors that could limit it? Are there phenomena that can only be explained via constraints? Why would syntax have both operations and constraints? My thesis explores these and related questions from a mathematically informed perspective. The central result is that Minimalist syntax can express a constraint purely via the operation Merge iff computing said constraint requires only a finitely bounded amount of working memory iff the constraint can be defined by an extension of first-order logic known as monadic second-order logic. A peculiar lexicalization procedure is used to establish the equivalence between Merge and constraints. ii The procedure pushes the working memory configurations that emerge during the computation of a constraint directly into the lexical categories. Refining categories in this fashion allows the selectional restrictions of lexical items to act as a proxy through which constraints are expressed via Merge. Merge-expressible constraints are very powerful and can capture dependencies between nodes as well as the domains that such dependencies are usually relativized to. Hence almost all conditions proposed in the syntactic literature belong to this class, including transderivational constraints and economy conditions. Surprisingly, the power of Merge-expressible constraints does not vary with respect to the type of syntactic tree structure they are stated over (phrase structure tree, multidominance tree, derivation tree), nor is it affected by locality restrictions. With respect to the issues raised above, then, the emerging picture is that the kind of constraints entertained by syntacticians belong to a uniform class of structural conditions that is computationally well-behaved and tightly linked to the foundations of the framework. The existence of these constraints in language is a natural consequence of the core component of Minimalist syntax: feature-driven Merge. Even though all claims are stated and proved with mathematical rigor, little knowledge is presupposed beyond a basic familiarity with generative syntax. Mini- malist grammars are used as a formalization of Minimalist syntax, complemented with ideas from formal language theory and mathematical logic. All concepts are carefully explained and illustrated with numerous examples, including some ad- vanced notions that so far have only been covered in highly technical papers. Thus the thesis should be of interest not only to theoretically minded syntacticians, but also to computational linguistics and everybody on their way to becoming one. iii The dissertation of Thomas Graf is approved. David Kaplan Edward L. Keenan Dominique Sportiche Edward P.Stabler, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 iv Don’t you use your fancy mathematics to muddy the issue! Applejack, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic v TABLEOF CONTENTS Introduction ...................................... 1 I Setting the Stage5 1 Minimalist Grammars ................................ 6 1.1 Minimalist Grammars: The Intuition....................7 1.1.1 Feature Calculus............................8 1.1.2 Derivations............................... 12 1.1.3 Building Structures.......................... 16 1.1.4 The Shortest Move Constraint.................... 24 1.1.5 Slices................................... 27 1.2 Formal Definition................................ 31 1.2.1 Combining Slices Into Derivation Trees.............. 33 1.2.2 The Feature Calculus as Tree-Geometric Constraints...... 38 1.2.3 From Derivations to Multi-Dominance Trees........... 45 1.2.4 Formal Summary............................ 51 1.3 The Chapter in Bullet Points......................... 52 2 Minimalist Grammars: Advanced Topics .................... 53 2.1 Selected Formal Results............................ 55 2.1.1 Derivational Complexity....................... 55 2.1.2 Weak Generative Capacity...................... 65 2.1.3 The Importance of Remnant Movement A ........... 67 vi 2.1.4 Strong Generative Capacity..................... 74 2.2 Evaluating the Adequacy of Minimalist Grammars............ 78 2.2.1 Relevance of Mathematical Results to Linguistics........ 79 2.2.2 Feature Calculus............................ 86 2.2.3 Movement................................ 91 2.2.4 Locality.................................. 95 2.2.5 Derived Trees.............................. 97 2.2.6 Generative Capacity.......................... 99 2.2.7 Missing Components......................... 105 2.3 The Chapter in Bullet Points......................... 108 II The Formal Landscape of Constraints 110 3 Constraints on Trees ................................. 111 3.1 A Taxonomy of Constraints.......................... 114 3.1.1 The Role of Constraints in Linguistics............... 114 3.1.2 The Müller-Sternefeld Hierarchy.................. 119 3.1.3 Logic and Constraints......................... 123 3.1.4 Formalizing the Research Problem................. 133 3.2 Tree-Local Constraints as Merge....................... 134 3.2.1 Operations on Minimalist Derivation Tree Languages..... 134 3.2.2 Constraints as Category Refinement: The Basic Idea...... 140 3.2.3 Formal Specification of the Refinement Algorithm A ..... 149 3.2.4 The Power of Lexical Refinement.................. 157 3.3 The Relative Power of Constraint Classes.................. 160 vii 3.3.1 A Revised Müller-Sternefeld Hierarchy.............. 160 3.3.2 Why use Constraints at all?..................... 168 3.4 Increasing the Faithfulness of MGs A ................... 173 3.4.1 Locality Conditions.......................... 173 3.4.2 Agreement and Pied-Piping..................... 176 3.4.3 Relaxing the SMC........................... 178 3.5 The Chapter in Bullet Points......................... 179 4 Transderivational Constraints ........................... 182 4.1 Transderivational Constraints as Rewriting Rules............. 185 4.1.1 Examples of Reference-Set Constraints.............. 185 4.1.2 Introducing Tree Transducers.................... 187 4.1.3 Putting it All Together......................... 194 4.2 Example 1: Focus Economy.......................... 199 4.2.1 Focus Economy Explained...................... 199 4.2.2 A Model of Focus Economy...................... 204 4.3 Example 2: Merge-over-Move........................ 216 4.3.1 Merge-over-Move Explained..................... 216 4.3.2 Properties of Merge-over-Move................... 219 4.3.3 A Model of MOM............................ 220 4.3.4 Empirical Evaluation......................... 225 4.4 Example 3: Shortest Derivation Principle................. 232 4.4.1 The Shortest Derivation Principle Explained........... 233 4.4.2 A Model of the Shortest Derivation Principle........... 235 4.4.3 Scope Economy: A Semantic SDP?................. 239 viii 4.5 The Chapter in Bullet Points......................... 241 Conclusion ....................................... 243 Symbols and Abbreviations ............................ 245 Bibliography ...................................... 247 ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS If PHD comics is to be believed, grad school is a never-ending plight, a soul-crushing purgatory where young, idealistic minds get to toil away in solitude while their cohorts are already transitioning into the proper adult lifestyle of family, money, careers. The thesis is a beacon of hope, the promise of salvation that will allow the devout grad student to ascend to the heavens of tenure track — or so they say. Frankly, I have no idea what all the fuss is about. Writing this thesis wasn’t a defining experience in my life, let alone a dreadful one. After all, it would not be an academic lifestyle without spending hours in front of a computer deprived of any social contact. Moreover, I had an excellent thesis committee, and I am grateful to all the members for making the gestation process an enjoyable experience. But whereas writing the thesis was only an enjoyable experience, not a defining one, the great time I had at UCLA definitely meets both criteria. Looking back, it is hard to believe how much of an impact the last five years have had one me (strictly positive, I assure you). Of course nobody has shaped my recent thinking more than Ed Stabler. In fact, Ed is the reason I am a mathematical linguist today. As an undergraduate I found myself disillusioned with both computational linguistics and generative syntax. But then, one lucky day, I stumbled