Without remnant movement, MGs are context-free

Abstract. Minimalist grammars offer a formal perspective on a popular linguistic theory, and are comparable in weak generative capacity to other mildly context sensitive formalism. Minimalist grammars allow for the straightforward definition of so-called remnant movement constructions, which have found use in many linguistic analyses. It has been conjectured that the ability to generate this kind of configuration is crucial to the super-context-free expressivity of minimalist grammars. This conjecture is here proven. In the minimalist program of [2], the well-formedness conditions on movement-type dependencies of the previous GB Theory [1] are reimplemented deriva-tionally, so as to render ill-formed movement chains impossible to assemble. For example, the c-command restriction on adjacent chain links is enforced by making movement always to the root of the current subtree–a position c-commanding any other. One advantage of this derivational reformulation of chain well-formedness conditions is that so-called ‘remnant movement ’ configurations, as depicted on the left in figure 1, are easy to generate. Remnant movement oc-curs when, due to previous movement operations, a moving expression does not itself have a grammatical description. Here we imagine that the objects deriv-able by the grammar in figure 1 include the black triangle and the complex of white and black triangles, but not the white triangle to the exclusion of the black triangle. From an incremental bottom-up perspective, the structure on the left in figure 1 first involves moving the grammatically specifiable black trian-gle, but then the non-directly grammatically describable white triangle moves. This is to be contrasted with the superficially similar configuration on the right in figure 1, in which, again from an incremental bottom-up perspective, bot