Coordination Funds

循环结构构建（如乔姆斯基的最简方案）和优化（如优选论）是语法理论的两个中心研究领域，但这两个领域的研究只有一小部分涉及它们的相互作用。循环语法模型背后的一般直觉是，相同的操作（或操作类型）迭代地应用于越来越大的形态句法域。这个想法的一个简单版本是将句法或形态结构构建操作与解释或重组操作交织在一起。因此，在乔姆斯基的最简语法框架中，基本操作合并是在创建层次句法表示（"树"）时的结构构建，而交替操作同意只是修改句法单位的特征内容，或者从稍微不同的角度来看，添加用于形态解释的信息。同样，在词汇音系学中，解释性音系规则与形态结构的构建循环交织。 通过优化，我们理解了一个语法过程，该过程基于一组结构化的标准，在不同的潜在替代方案中进行选择，并阻止次优的替代方案。一个经典的例子是在别处条件，它捕捉了这样一个事实，例如，更具体的形态实现阻止了更一般的形态实现，例如潜在的英语复数形式 * ox-es被列出的形式ox-en阻止。这里设想的广义优化不仅是优化理论和和声语法的基础，而且是心理语言学种族模型，基于类比的模型，以及句法派生方法中的最后手段和修复操作。这里提出的研究单位的目标是探索这样一个假设，即结合循环性和优化实现了一个单独无法获得的额外解释水平：周期性可以大大限制优化过程的搜索空间，并解释为什么优化通常是表面不透明的，而优化则对周期的时间，大小和可变性进行了原则性解释，在这些结果的基础上，我们希望将循环性和优化性相互作用的模型的经验覆盖范围扩展到广泛的语法现象，并开发它们的全部理论潜力。因此，研究单位的单个子项目调查所有基本语法模块（形态，句法，语义和语音）之间的相互作用，并在相同和相关类型的经验数据上系统地评估和比较循环优化的不同版本。 此外，一个互补的计算子项目研究了跨语法领域的循环优化方法的抽象，正式属性。

Cyclic structure building (as in Chomsky’s Minimalist Program) and optimization (as in Optimality Theory) are two central research areas of grammatical theory, but only a fraction of the research in both fields addresses their interaction. The general intuition behind cyclic models of grammars is that the same operations (or types of operations) apply iteratively in increasingly bigger morphosyntactic domains. A simple version of this idea is interleaving syntactic or morphological structure-building operations with interpretive or restructuring operations. Thus, in Chomsky’s Minimalist Syntax, the basic operation Merge is structure-building in creating hierarchical syntactic representations (‘trees’) whereas the alternating operation Agree just modifies the featural content of syntactic units, or, under a slightly different perspective, adds information for morphological interpretation. Similarly in Lexical Phonology, interpretive phonological rules are cyclically interleaved with morphological structure building. By optimization, we understand a grammatical procedure which chooses among different potential alternatives and blocks suboptimal alternatives, based on a structured set of criteria. A classical case is the Elsewhere Condition which captures, for example, the fact that more specific morphological realizations block more general ones, such as the blocking of the potential English plural forms *ox-es by the listed form ox-en. Optimization in the broad sense envisaged here underlies not only Optimality Theory and Harmonic Grammar, but also psycholinguistic race models, analogy-based models, and last-resort and repair operations in derivational approaches to syntax. The goal of the research unit proposed here is to explore the hypothesis that combining cyclicity and optimization achieves an added level of explanation not available to either alone: Cyclicity can substantially restrict the search space of optimization processes and explain why optimization is often surface-opaque, while optimization yields a principled account for the timing, size, and variability of cycles, as shown by encouraging results in Stratal Optimality Theory and Harmonic Serialism Based on these results, we want to extend the empirical coverage of models where cyclicity and optimization crucially interact to a comprehensive range of grammatical phenomena, and develop their full theoretical potential. Thus the single sub-projects in the research unit investigate the interactions between all basic grammatical modules (morphology, syntax, semantics, and phonology), and evaluate and compare systematically different versions of Cyclic Optimization on the same and related types of empirical data. In addition, a complementary computational sub-project investigates abstract, formal properties of Cyclic Optimization approaches across grammatical areas.