Locality

Abstract

Natural language syntax is unbounded, but syntactic processes respect fundamental locality principles. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate linguistic locality through various phenomena uncovered by formal and comparative syntacticians, and show the relevance of syntactic locality for the experimental study of language as a cognitive capacity, both in acquisition and in adult speakers. Two major concepts of locality seem to be operative: impenetrability, expressing the fact that certain syntactic configurations are impervious to rules (e.g., island constraints), and intervention locality, blocking movement and other processes across an intervening element. This paper will focus on a subclass of locality effects, looking at intervention on movement dependencies. One crucial property of intervention locality is that it is calculated in hierarchical, not in linear terms, the crucial hierarchical relation being c-command: this is just a subcase of the general fact that linguistic computations are typically sensitive to hierarchical properties (dominance, c-command) rather then to linear properties (precedence in the linear order). The paper will present featural Relativized Minimality, a particular formal implementation of intervention locality, will illustrate its application through various kinds of locality effect in cases of extractions from embedded domains, and will show its explanatory capacity not only on issues of comparative syntax, but also on aspects of the acquisition of syntactic dependencies.