Recent work in the Minimalist Program has made use of the Extended Projection Principle as a licensing feature for subject nominals explicitly separate from abstract nominative Case (Chomsky 1995). Both features are checked in Chomsky's system by the Tense head. Chomsky adopts the case system for licensing PRO proposed in Chomsky and Lasnik 1993, whereby PRO receives null case from an appropria...

1. Introduction Statistical learning, and " any account which assigns a fundamental role to segmentation, categorization, analogy, and generalization " is rejected in Chom-skyan linguistics as " mistaken in principle " (Chomsky, 1975). Acquisition is viewed, rather, as a search through the set of possible grammars for natural language , guided by successive inputs; or alternatively, as a parame...

Introduction This paper starts from the observation that the Binding Theory (viz. Chomsky 1981, 1986) is problematic from a minimalist perspective. More specifically, if one assumes that reflexives move, then principle A should be dispensed with. However, if one dispenses with principle A, then principle B becomes very problematic and should be rethought. This paper considers how to do this. Th...

Many patterns found in natural language syntax have multiple pos-sible explanations or structural descriptions. Even within the cur-rently dominant Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995, 2000), it is not uncommon to encounter types of analyses for same phenomenon proposed literature. A question, then, whether one could evaluate and compare syntactic proposals from a quantitative point view. In thi...