The Track of Real Desires

Lexico-Logical Form relates in aim to Noam Chomsky's recent works on economy andminimalism: both authors recast the structure of the grammar, revealing its essential properties inthe process. In Lexico- Logical Form, Michael Brody meticulously dissects aspects of the Principlesand Parameters theory, pares away the extraneous, focuses on core issues, and recreates them insubtle 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 havedirect access to the single syntactic representation, called Lexico-Logical Form. He proposes tostreamline the syntactic component of the grammar by eliminating syntactic derivation and allsyntactic levels of representation other than LF, the interface with the semantic component.Acentral driving force throughout is the elimination of redundancy in the theory. Since movementcharacterizes a subset of the relations characterized by chains, the former is eliminated. Since thelexicon must constrain the input to the semantic component, intervening representations areeliminated, and the relationship beween the lexicon and LF becomes direct. This timely approachexplores a logical next step in the minimalist path.Lingistic Inquiry Monograph No. 27