Linguistic Derivations and Filtering: Minimalism and Optimality Theory

This volume focuses on the role of the postulated derivational and filtering devices in current linguistic theory. It promotes the exchange of ideas between the proponents of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program and Prince and Smolensky’s Optimality Theory to evaluate the role of these devices in the two frameworks. It discusses the tenability of the often proclaimed opinion that the Minimalist Program and Optimality Theory are incompatible frameworks, given that the explanatory power of the former mainly resides on the generative device, whereas the explanatory power of the latter mainly resides in the filtering device. The papers presented here discuss and compare the two devices in these two frameworks from various perspectives, collating a number of arguments that favour a strictly derivational, a strictly filtering, or a hybrid approach. This book is directed to syntacticians working within the current frameworks that have developed from the Minimalist Program and Optimality Theory, but it will also be of interest to researchers or advanced students of linguistic theory.

Hans Broekhuis has worked as a researcher and assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Tilburg, University Leiden and, currently, the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam. His theoretical work is mainly conducted within the principles-and-parameters framework. More recently he developed a more hybrid framework, which combines certain properties of the minimalist program and optimality theory (Derivations and evaluations: Object shift in the Germanic languages, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008). Ralf Vogel is professor of German linguistics at the University of Bielefeld. He mainly works within the framework of generative grammar, focusing on syntax and its interfaces with semantics and phonology, and their modeling within optimality theory. More recent work is dealing with the syntax-prosody interface and with the integration of advanced methods of empirical linguistic research with grammatical theory. He is co-editor of Minimality Effects in Syntax (with Artur Stepanov and Gisbert Fanselow, Mouton de Gruyter, 2004) and Gradience in Grammar: Generative Perspectives (with Gisbert Fanselow, Caroline Fery and Matthias Schlesewsky, Oxford University Press, 2006).