Minimalist grammar

Minimalist grammars are a class of formal grammars that aim to provide a more rigorous, usually proof-theoretic, formalization of Chomskyan Minimalist program than is normally provided in the mainstream Minimalist literature. A variety of particular formalizations exist, most of them developed by Edward Stabler, Alain Lecomte, Christian Retoré, or combinations thereof. Minimalist grammars are a class of formal grammars that aim to provide a more rigorous, usually proof-theoretic, formalization of Chomskyan Minimalist program than is normally provided in the mainstream Minimalist literature. A variety of particular formalizations exist, most of them developed by Edward Stabler, Alain Lecomte, Christian Retoré, or combinations thereof. Lecomte and Retoré (2001) introduce a formalism that modifies that core of the Lambek Calculus to allow for movement-like processes to be described without resort to the combinatorics of Combinatory categorial grammar. The formalism is presented in proof-theoretic terms. Differing only slightly in notation from Lecomte and Retoré (2001), we can define a minimalist grammar as a 3-tuple G = ( C , F , L ) {displaystyle G=(C,F,L)} , where C {displaystyle C} is a set of 'categorial' features, F {displaystyle F} is a set of 'functional' features (which come in two flavors, 'weak', denoted simply f {displaystyle f} , and 'strong', denoted f ∗ {displaystyle f*} ), and L {displaystyle L} is a set of lexical atoms, denoted as pairs w : t {displaystyle w:t} , where w {displaystyle w} is some phonological/orthographic content, and t {displaystyle t} is a syntactic type defined recursively as follows: