Economy in TAG

1. On the role of economy in grammatical derivations Much recent work within generative grammar has made use ofthe idea that grammatical derivations exhibit a certain type of economy. The intuition behind this appücation of economy is a familiar one: that the well-formed sentences of a language are as simple as they can be (given the demands of expressiveness), and do not involve any unnecessary lexical items or dislocations. There have been a variety of formalizations of the relevant notion of economy, with a range of empirical consequence. Let us look at one of these, proposed by Chomsky (1995, ch.4) to account for the contrast between the examples in (1).