A Minimalist View of Components in Generative Grammar

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<Jun Abe>In this project, Jun Abe has been working mainly on the following two questions : (i) In such a language as Japanese that allows free word-order, this property is standardly captured by the rule called scrambling, and then how is this peculiar movement rule to be subsumed under the Minimalist Program? ; (ii) How is the phenomenon of pronoun-drop observed in Japanese to be captured under the Minimalist Program? As for the question (i), it is revealed by this project that though scrambling is standardly assumed to be free in its application, it is subject to a sort of economy condition to the effect that it gives way to a well-established operator movement when the latter operation gives rise to the same effect in word order as scrambling. For details, see his articled entitled "An Economy Condition on Scrambling" in the report of our project. As for the question (ii), it turned out that the pronoun-drop phenomenon observed in Japanese is quite different in its syntactic nature … More from that observed in such inflectional languages as Italian and Spanish. For details, see his articled entitled "Licensing Conditions in Ellipsis " in the report of our project.<Kuniya Nasukawa>Following his original study plan, during the aforementioned period Nasukawa attempted to introduce into phonological theory several aspects of syntactic theory based on the minimalist program. In particular, the following two points have been reviewed : (1) types of phonological primes and (2) intrasegmental representations. Regarding (1), Nasukawa has used the framework of Element Theory to establish intrasegmental representations which are redundant-free and which reflect implicational universals. With respect to (2), he has proposed a model in which derivationally restrictive constraints control the dependency relations holding within intrasegmental structures. These proposals have been presented at several different conferences held within Japan and also overseas.<Phillip Backley>With Kuniya Nasukawa, Backley has established a redundancy-free model of prosodic representations within the framework of Licensing/Government Phonology. In particular, Backley has clarified some correlations between prosodic structures and the aforementioned model of intrasegmental structure. The resulting reports have been delivered at several international conferences. Less