In this dissertation I provide a directly compositional semantics for
minimalist grammars, which allows us to view the derivation as the only
relevant syntactic structure, thereby eliminating all non-interface levels,
and obtaining a system similar in this respect to categorial grammar. I
give an explicit account of a fragment of English consisting of
passivization, raising, control, and expletive-it, which accounts for
quantifier scope ambiguities. The system is quite minimal; there are no
trans-derivational economy conditions, no preferences for merge over move,
no numerations, no lexical sub-arrays. Instead, all operations are feature
driven, and there is a single economy condition, the Principle of
Immediacy, which simply requires that features be checked as soon as the
appropriate configuration arises.
I add copy movement to the minimalist grammar system. I implement copying
in two ways. Once with multiple dominance, treating copies as being derived
only once, and once with synchronous derivation, treating each copy as
having been derived. Both approaches are strongly equivalent, and generate
only languages in P. Our semantics extends immediately to minimalist
grammars with copying.
I turn next to the West African language Yoruba, which has constructions
characterized by overt copying of VPs. As Yoruba also has serial verbs,
there is no principled upper bound on the size of the copied VP. I give an
explicit account of a fragment of Yoruba consisting of serialization and
relative clauses, both over predicates (the so-called relativized
predicate) and over nouns. Copying in Yoruba relativized predicates is not
a straightforward matter, with the copy relation sometimes rendered opaque
by other processes. However, our minimalist grammars with copying account
elegantly for the range of copy possibilities, and assign natural
structures to these copies, which no known mildly context sensitive
formalism is capable of doing.
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