Contents 1 On Reducing Principles to Rules 1

abstract. According to the research principles of the tradition established by Noam Chomsky, one should always try to get rid of construction speciic rules. In Bare Phrase Structure he has carried this out to the extreme for the basic generative component now known as X-bar-syntax. Based on this example, we will examine the dialectics between speciic rules and conditions on rules or principles. We will show that there is a two-way reduction, one from rules to conditions on rules, and the other from conditions on rules to speciic rules. As an eeect of this reduction, a particular linguistic theory can be presented alternatively as a set of rules or as an axiomatic extension of the logical theory of all phrase structure trees | or in fact a suitable mixture of the two. Although this reduction is a purely formal one | and therefore less interesting for a linguist subscribing to the Principles and Parameters approach | it ooers the possibility to draw on a large array of results both from logic and from ordinary formal language theory.