On Directionality of Phrase Structure Building.

Minimalism in grammatical theorizing (Chomsky in The minimalist program. MIT Press, Cambridge, ) led to simpler linguistic devices and a better focalization of the core properties of the structure building engine: a lexicon and a free (recursive) phrase formation operation, dubbed Merge, are the basic components that serve in building syntactic structures. Here I suggest that by looking at the elementary restrictions that apply to Merge (i.e., selection and licensing of functional features), we could conclude that a re-orientation of the syntactic derivation (from bottom-up/right-left to top-down/left-right) is necessary to make the theory simpler, especially for long-distance (filler-gap) dependencies, and is also empirically more adequate. If the structure building operations would assemble lexical items in the order they are pronounced (Phillips in Order and structure. PhD thesis, MIT, ; Chesi in Phases and cartography in linguistic computation: Toward a cognitively motivated computational model of linguistic competence. PhD thesis, Università di Siena, ; Chesi in Competence and computation: Toward a processing friendly minimalist grammar. Unipress, Padova, ), on-line performance data could better fit the grammatical model, without resorting to external 'performance factors.' The phase-based, top-down (and, as a consequence, left-right) Minimalist Grammar here discussed goes in this direction, ultimately showing how strong Islands (Huang in Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar. PhD thesis, MIT, ) and intervention effects (Gordon et al. in J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 27:1411-1423, , Gordon et al. in J Mem Lang 51:97-114, ) could be better explained in structural terms assuming this unconventional derivational direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]