Title

Minimalism and Optionality

Author

Yen-hui Audrey Li

Genre

Article  

Pages

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Key words

minimalist program, minimal effort optimality, movement, reconstruction, topicalization, reflexive, pronoun, minimal syntactic representations

Abstract

      In contrast to the notion of applying “affect α” whenever possible within the Principles and Parameters framework, the Minimalist program requires grammatical operations to take place only when required morphologically. This raises the question of whether optionality exists in the grammar. This work, based on the examination of nominal structures and interpretations, topicalization and other related structures in Chinese, argues that neither optional movement nor optional reconstruction exists in Chinese. Reconstruction is governed by the last resort principle (minimal effort). It is also shown that minimality plays a role in determining syntactic representations which are potentially ambiguous.