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This reanalysis of minimalist syntax considers the optimal design properties for human language. Taking as its starting point Noam Chomsky’s minimalist assumption that the syntactic component of a language generates representations for sentences that are interpreted at perceptual and conceptual interfaces, the book investigates how these representations can be generated most parsimoniously. Countering the prevailing analyses of minimalist syntax, it argues that the computational properties of human language consist only of strictly local Merge operations that lack both look-back and look-forward properties. All grammatical operations reduce to a single sort of locally defined feature-checking operation, and all grammatical properties are the cumulative effects of local grammatical operations. As the book demonstrates, reducing syntactic operations to local operations with a single property—merging lexical material into syntactic derivations—not only radically increases the computational efficiency of the syntactic component, but also optimally simplifies the design of the computational system. The book explains a range of syntactic phenomena that have long resisted previous generative theories, including that-trace effects, superiority effects, and the interpretations available for multiple-wh constructions. It also introduces the Survive Principle, an important new concept for syntactic analysis, and provides something considered impossible in minimalist syntax: a locality account of displacement phenomena.

Chomsky showed that no description of natural language syntax would be adequate without some notion of movement operations in a syntactic derivation. It now seems likely that such movement transformations are formally simple operations, in which a single phrase is displaced from its original position within a phrase marker, but after more than fifty years of generative theorizing, the mechanics of syntactic movement are still murky and controversial. This book examines the forces that drive syntactic movement and offers a new synthetic model of the basic movement operation by reassembling isolated ideas which have been suggested elsewhere in the literature. The unifying concept is the operation of provocation, which occurs in the course of feature valuation when certain probes seek a value for their unvalued features by identifying a goal. Provocation forces the generation of a copy of the goal; the copy originates outside the original phrase marker and must then be introduced into it. In this approach, movement is not forced by the need for extra positions; extra positions are generated because movement is taking place. After presenting the central proposal and showing its implementation in the analyses of various familiar cases of syntactic movement, the author demonstrates the effects of provocation in a variety of inversion constructions; examines interactions between head and phrasal provocation within the “left periphery” of Germanic embedded clauses; and describes the details of chain formation and successive cyclic movement in a provocation model.