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Branching constraints

Rejecting approaches with a directionality parameter, mainstream minimalism has adopted the notion of strict (or unidirectional) branching. Within optimality theory however, constraints have recently been proposed that presuppose that the branching direction scheme is language specific. I show that a syntactic analysis of Chechen word order and relative clauses using strict branching and
movement triggered by feature checking seems very unlikely, whereas a directionality approach works well. I argue in favor of a mixed directionality approach for Chechen, where the branching direction scheme depends on the phrase type. This observation leads to the introduction of context variants of existing markedness constraints, in order to describe the branching processes in terms of optimality theory. The paper discusses how and where the optimality theory selection of the branching directions can be implemented within a
minimalist derivation.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:Potsdam/oai:kobv.de-opus-ubp:3227
Date January 2009
CreatorsKomen, Erwin R.
PublisherUniversität Potsdam, Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät. Institut für Linguistik / Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
Source SetsPotsdam University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightshttp://opus.kobv.de/ubp/doku/urheberrecht.php

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