Exrolorations into the Top-Down Reconstruction of Logical Structure

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After showing that bottom-up approaches to reconstruction phenomena have both empirical and theoretical flaws, the investigator has proposed a top-down alternative. Chapter 2 discusses the issue of timing of the application of the Binding Theory, claiming that Chomsky's view that the Binding Conditions are best analyzed as an interpretive rule applied at Logical Form. Reviewing the phase-based theory of reconstruction, Chapter 3 demonstrates the fact that some ancillary assumptions have to be made to maintain this approach. Chapter 4 adds some further confirmation from the latest researches to the investigator's perennial attempt to derive the general ban on extraction from the subject of a sentence from Chonisky's intervening condition, according to which an intervening feature blocks checking of other features. Chapter 5 is devoted to the top-down derivation of causative sentences in various languages. Chapter 6 points out several empirical and theoretical problems with the theory in which rightward scrambling in Hindi-Urdu is analyzed as involving remnant movement of a predicate from which a constituent has been extracted via leftward scrambling. Chapter 7 introduces a top-down approach to reconstruction, proposing that what is moved is not the whole copy of the previously introduced constituent, but its grammatical features neccessary to the subsequent derivation. 'To be more concrete, phonological, formal and semantic features are introduced in the leftmost position of a movement dependency, followed by creation of the copies of only formal and semantic features. The viability of this theory is attested by several reconstruction facts.