No description available.

This thesis deals with two aspects of operators within the framework of Government and Binding theory; (i) how they are assigned their scope, and (ii) how they are licensed. In an attempt to answer these questions, the relation of Move $ alpha$ (such as scrambling, NP-movement, and wh-movement) to the scope of operators and the licensing of wh-elements, negative polarity items, and adverbs are examined. It is argued that scope assignment is dictated by the Scope Principle and the Empty Category Principle. It is also argued that licensing of operators is determined by the Feature-Dependent Item Criterion. These principles and criterion make use of the concept of Government Theory Compatibility, which is built into Relativized Minimality. It is suggested that this concept should be characterized in terms of a set of lexical features. The approach advocated here accounts for the interpretive and distributional behavior of operators without recourse to parameterization of LF principles.

No description available.

In this thesis I investigate the crucial role played by government in phonology in explaining various processes such as epenthesis, vowel deletion, vowel harmony, consonant assimilation, as well as the syllabification of skeletal points along with their segments into constituents, and the organization of these constituents in the word. It is argued that all these phonological processes are determined by governing relations units contract with each other. / Given that government applies in phonology defining the constraints under which it operates is an integral part of such a research program. The aim of this thesis then, is to analyze different phonological processes in terms of government and to determine what the relevant constraints are. The processes that are considered involve governing relations between nuclei that are adjacent at the level of nuclear projection. I show that in considering branching constituents as governing domains, government within such domains is subject to a special constraint, viz. the Minimality Condition that has been proposed by Chomsky (1986). In addition I demonstrate that only the immediate projection of a given head counts as a barrier to government from the outside. / Another proposal of this thesis concerns the treatment of the alternations between schwa and zero in French in terms of a relation of proper government. From such a perspective, I show that an empty nucleus is realized as zero when it is properly governed by a following nucleus. Proper government is a stronger case of government and is subject to certain additional conditions. Among them are the following: the proper governor must have phonetic content and subject to parametric variation, it can only properly govern one empty governee.

No description available.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1982. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES / Bibliography: leaves 506-514. / by Denis Bouchard. / Ph.D.