Minimalism and Logical Form

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This is a project of research in syntactic theory, within the general framework known as the "Minimalist Program" (MP). The aim of the MP is to simplify radically the assumptions and the mechanisms of the "Government-and-Binding" (GB) theoretical framework which was the lineal antecedent of MP, while continuing to account for the empirical data the GB handles successfully. In this particular project, the investigators will focus on developing a satisfactory theoretical account of the properties of quantified expressions, like "every child" or "many books". Interpretations of sentences containing two or more such expressions show that they interact in interesting ways, especially with respect to their "scope", which may be wide or narrow. The topic to be investigated here will be whether structural patterns which need to be posited for other purposes, such as assignment of case categories to noun phrases, can be exploited to give the right results in interpreting quantified expressions, without the need of the somewhat elaborate machinery for their interpretation which has evolved in the GB framework.