Choosing as my vantage point the linguistically motivated Müller-Sternefeld hierarchy [23], which classifies constraints according to their locality properties, I investigate the interplay of various syntactic constraint classes on a formal level. For non-comparative constraints, I use Rogers's framework of multi-dimensional trees [31] to state Müller and Sternefeld's definitions in general yet rigorous terms that are compatible with a wide range of syntactic theories, and I formulate conditions under which distinct non-comparative constraints are equivalent. Comparative constraints, on the other hand, are shown to be best understood in terms of optimality systems [5]. From this I derive that some of them are reducible to non-comparative constraints. The results jointly vindicate a broadly construed version of the Müller-Sternefeld hierarchy, yet they also support a refined picture of constraint interaction that has profound repercussions for both the study of locality phenomena in natural language and how the complexity of linguistic proposals is to be assessed. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.
CITATION STYLE
Graf, T. (2010). Some interdefinability results for syntactic constraint classes. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 6149 LNAI, pp. 72–87). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14322-9_7
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