Lexico-Logical Form: A Radically Minimalist Theory

In Lexico-Logical Form, Michael Brody meticulously dissects aspects of the Principles and Parameters theory, pares away the extraneous, focuses on core issues, and recreates them in subtle and interesting ways. Lexico-Logical Form relates in aim to Noam Chomsky's recent works on economy and minimalism: both authors recast the structure of the grammar, revealing its essential properties in the process. In Lexico- Logical Form, Michael Brody meticulously dissects aspects of the Principles and Parameters theory, pares away the extraneous, focuses on core issues, and recreates them in subtle and interesting ways. Brody argues for and discusses aspects of a radically minimalist, nonderivational approach to syntax in which both the central conceptual systems and the lexicon have direct access to the single syntactic representation, called Lexico-Logical Form. He proposes to streamline the syntactic component of the grammar by eliminating syntactic derivation and all syntactic levels of representation other than LF, the interface with the semantic component. A central driving force throughout is the elimination of redundancy in the theory. Since movement characterizes a subset of the relations characterized by chains, the former is eliminated. Since the lexicon must constrain the input to the semantic component, intervening representations are eliminated, and the relationship beween the lexicon and LF becomes direct. This timely approach explores a logical next step in the minimalist path. Lingistic Inquiry Monograph No. 27