An introduction to Phase-based Minimalist Grammars: why move is Top-Down from Left-to-Right

This paper is an introduction to a grammatical formalism (Phase-based Minimalist Grammar, elaboration of Stabler’s 1997 Minimalist Grammar) that includes a revised version of the standard minimalist structure building operations merge, move and the notion of derivation by phase (Chomsky 1999-2005). The main difference with respect to the standard theory is that these devices strictly operate TopDown and from Left-to-Right. In these pages I will argue that long distance dependencies, such as successive cyclic A'-movement, are better understood within this unconventional (at least within the Minimalist Program) phase-based directional perspective.