Locality in Flux — Reducability Results for Syntactic Constraints

Müller (2005) proposes a locality hierarchy of syntactic constraints such that representa-tional = derivational< global< translocal< transderivational. Representational constraints restrict nodes in tree structures, whereas derivational and global constraints restrict, re-spectively, derivationally adjacent and non-adjacent trees. Translocal and transderivational constraints are comparative economy constraints, the former operating on sets of represen-tations and the latter on sets of derivations. We use formal methods to demonstrate that the hierarchy correctly predicts that higher constraint classes are more powerful, but we also show that there are constraints that can be reduced to a constraint in a weaker class. In particular, some but not all comparative constraints can be rendered as non-comparative constraints, and constraints might be global in a representational framework but local in a derivational one. We call this the in flux property of locality. Our results hence have important ramifications for our conception of locality, the relation between representational and derivational theories, the status of reference set computation, and the psychological reality of constraints. In order to ensure that our work applies across the entire range of proposals in th