Radical minimalism

La interpretación de la función semántica de los argumentos es un tema que ha estado presente desde los inicios de la Gramática Generativa, con trabajos tan influyentes como Gruber (1965). Posteriormente, ya en el modelo GB, se intentó formalizar el conjunto de estas funciones semánticas (los Roles Temáticos, o roles-θ) mediante la llamada Teoría Temática. En el presente trabajo nos disponemos a hacer una revisión de la naturaleza y  justificación empírica y teórica de la Teoría Temática y los Roles Temáticos, partiendo de las concepciones clásicas de GB hasta llegar a las últimas revisiones dentro del marco del Programa Minimalista. Por último, intentaremos proponer una nueva teoría de los roles temáticos que se nutre no sólo de la Gramática Generativa sino también de las propuestas de la Teoría de la Relevancia y el Funcionalismo norteamericano. Intentaremos derivar una teoría temática con la menor cantidad posible de estipulaciones en un plano metodológico y de primitivos en un plano ontológico, lo que requerirá una revisión profunda del concepto de Caso y la determinación del ámbito de pertinencia de cada uno, en la medida en que consideramos que hay una relación de proyección entre Caso y rol-θ.

In this paper we will critically revisit generative Binding Theory, one of the foundational stones of the GB model, and a stronghold of orthodox approaches to semantics and Logical Form within the Minimalist Program. The theory assumes a typology of referential expressions, based on distributional constraints given by two properties, anaphoric and pronominal. In this work, we will conceive a maximally simplified lexicon containing only lexical type-variables -instantiated as tokens in a particular derivation- and procedural elements, and attempt to: (a) derive distributional constraints over referential expressions, including verbs (eventive entities) and nouns (sortal entities), from more basic principles of grammar, and (b) derive the materialization (Spell-Out) of variables corresponding to those types of entities from local relations between tokens of lexical variables in a syntactic-semantic construal, and functional-procedural nodes. Our objective is to question the consideration of the typology of referential entities in Mainstream Generative Grammar (MGG) as primitives of Binding Theory, as part of an eliminative program for linguistic theory.

This paper is about intersecting planes. We argue that “language”, not only as a formal entity but also as a biologically (and thus, physically) based system, is nothing more and nothing less than the intersection of three systems, each of which has independent existence and takes part in independent cognitive / computational processes. The systems we will consider are the well-known syntax, semantics and phonology, which we will analyze in a novel manner: rather than brought together by an undefined “rewiring” of the brain (see Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch, 2002; Chomsky, 2005, among others), we will follow and hopefully advance recent research (e.g., Uriagereka, 2012) claiming that “language” is better defined as the resolution between a fundamental tension that arises in the intersection between these systems.

The course is based on Krivochen (2011b, 2012a, b) and Krivochen & Kosta (2013). For technical details, please see the referred documents, available in Academia, LingBuzz and open access journals, where applicable.

12/08/2015: Slightly revised version.

In this work we will develop the thesis that the concept of dynamical frustration (Binder, 2008), involving the tension between conflicting tendencies in a physical system, is essential when analyzing the cognitive-computational bases of language. We will argue that there are two kinds of frustrations interplaying, in principle as independent theses: an architectural global frustration relating phrase structural and Markovian processes in general computations; and a local derivational frustration relating semantic and phonological cycles within language processing. After developing and analyzing each frustration, with particular focus on human language, we will briefly explore the consequences these frustrations have on the “design” of mental faculties, and the impact our theory has on the Minimalist notion of “perfection in language design”.

Causatives and Anti-Causatives, Unaccusatives and Unergatives: Or How Big is the Contribution of the Lexicon to Syntax

In this paper the features of externally and internally caused verbs have been described, and connected with the phenomenon of Unaccusativity. It was my approach to elaborate the relation between lexicon and syntax, including the concept of distributive morphol- ogy and the ROOT-semantics of verbs that do, resp. do not partake in causative alternation and Unaccusativity.
The Causative Alternation served as criteria to distinguish between externally and internally (caused) causation; with its help the Unaccusativity verbs have been divided into two subclasses: alternating Unaccusativity (AU-) verbs and non-alternating Un- accusativity (NAU-) verbs. An alternative distinction between AU- and NAU-verbs has been found, namely the presence/absence of information about how the considered process was caused. Thereby the universal concept of encyclopedic lexica in the lan- guages English, German and Czech seems to assume at least four different ROOTS of verb as basis for classification of the anti-causativity-opposition: √agentive (murder, assassinate, cut), √internally caused (blossom, wilt, grow), √externally caused (destroy, kill, slay) and √cause unspecified (break, open, melt).
Furthermore, it has been shown that unergative/causative pairs depict an independ- ent phenomenon and do not effect the considerations about CAL (in accordance with Alexiadou et al. 2006a, b and Marantz 1997; but not in accordance with Levin − Rap- paport Hovav 1995 and Reinhart 2000).

[A little bit outdated...do check out 'On phrase structure building', though, if you're interested in construal and generative operations. The spirit is here, but not so clearly outlined, I'm afraid] A programmatic paper on what we have called Radical Minimalism, following the track of our previous works (Krivochen, 2010a, b, c, d, 2011). We would like to specially thank Cedric Boeckx for his comments, Phoevos Panagiotidis for comments and objections and Peter Kosta and Mike Putnam for thorough "reviews" and comments. All errors, needless to say, are entirely our own.

In this paper we will revisit a distinction that has been core to GB and Minimalist approaches to the property of displacement in natural languages: the opposition between A(rgumental) and A’ (non-argumental) positions, as sources and targets of the general operation Move-α (Lasnik & Saito, 1992; Chomsky, 1995). Minimalism brought an additional requirement for the establishment of chains generated via movement, the Chain Uniformity Principle, requiring that all members of a chain be in uniform positions with respect to a certain property. We will argue that such chains, even if possible in principle, are not desirable for both theoretical and empirical reasons, with Radical Minimalism as our theoretical framework. The rejection of the Chain Uniformity Principle will ultimately lead us to revisit the A/A’ distinction as a real and relevant theoretical concept.

The paper offers a description of Slavic word order systems from the viewpoint of formal typology basing on such notions as syntactic type, parametric settings, basic and derived order, linearization constraints, constituency, movement, spell-out, cliticity, clitic clusters, syntax-prosody interface, grammaticalization, Relativized Minimality, Radical Minimalism.

The general aim is to classify Slavic word order systems with clitics on the basis of syntactic constraints without sticking to hypotheses about language-specific properties of prosodically deficient elements and to provide a viable typological classification, which can be
verified by data from other world’s languages.
After having introduced the notion clitic cluster vs. clitic template, we are concentrating on 2.1 Cliticization into DP/NP and on 2.2. Clusters and the Template Principle. We also give insigths into how 2.3. Clause-level Clitics and Clusterization in Slavic can be analyzed and how 2.4. Syntactic Clitics and Prosodic clitics can be treated and we give an overview about 2.5. Areal Slavic Types of a Clitic Template and about 2.6. 2P Clitics and Non-clusterizing Clitics. In 2.7. we adopt the hypothesis of Comp/XP as a universal clitic basis, since it predicts the placement of Slavic clausal 2P elements in the best possible way and is typologically more reliable than the alternative hypothesis of 2P as a primarily phonetic phenomenon (cf. Halpern (1996) for a different approach).
In secttion 2.8. entitled Tobler-Musaffia’s Law, 2P-clitics and VA-clitics Revisited, we try to put forward a claim that the description of word order systems of clausal clitics should base on syntactic constraints and be maximally independent from conjectures on restrictions imposed by allegedly purely phonetic or lexical properties of clitics.
The further sections of this article include the following:
3. Barrier Theory and Derived Word Orders with Clitics
3.1. Blind and Selective Barriers
3.2. Communicative and Grammaticalized Barriers
3.3. Barriers and Verb Movement
3.4. Barriers and Clitic Movement
3.5. Multiple Barriers and Blocking of the Barrier Effect
4. Slavic Word Order Systems
4.1. Standard W-systems
4.2. W+-systems
4.3. W*-systems
4.4. C-systems
4.5. The Unity and Diversity of Slavic Word Order Systems
5. Slavic VA Clitics as Strong 2P clitics: the VA vs 2P Distinction Revisited
6. Further Problems and Perspectives: Possessor Raising
7. Conclusions

Edited by Anna Maria di Sciullo and Cedric Boeckx Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-955327-3 (Hbk) 978-0-19-955328-0 (Pbk) One of the most fascinating but at the same time still not very thoroughly investigated fields is the "Biolinguistic enterprise" of human language faculty as opposed to other means of communication between say animals or computers and humans. Anna Maria di Sciullo and Cedric Boeckx, the editors of the present issue, belong to the founders of the new type of interdisciplinary research that seeks to explore "the basic properties of human language and to investigate how it matures in the individual, how it is put to use in thought and communication, what brain circuits implement it, what combination of genes supports it, and how it emerged in our species." (General preface).

In this paper we will analyze the conceptual and computational motivations of the property of displacement in natural languages from a revisited perspective. We will account for displacement phenomena proposing our own version of displacement-as-external token Merge, as opposed to the traditional displacement-as-literal movement or, more recently, displacement-as-copy and Merge (Chomsky, 1995; Kitahara, 1997; Nunes, 2004). Our focus, as far as empirical data is concerned, will be set on parasitic gaps and their derivation, comparing our proposal with previous accounts making particular stress on the idea that operations are not feature-driven but interface-driven.

A range of syntactic and semantic data from English and Spanish supports the recognition of two kinds of coordination, which we call et- and que-coordination after the coordinators et and -que in Latin. Et-coordination is hypotactic and imperfective, by virtue of its terms’ being accessible for further syntactic and interpretive operations; que-coordination is paratactic and perfective, by virtue of its terms forming a single, unanalyzable whole, that is, an object that is impossible to probe into. Imperfective et-coordination is computable by a context free or possibly context sensitive automaton; perfective que-coordination is computable by a finite state automaton, whose lack of a memory tape explains how these structures are formally points with no accessible internal structure. We show further how the aspectual distinction we argue for has relevance beyond verbs and coordinate structures by including a study of imperatives, which are like que-coordinated structures in having a perfective, finite state character that explains their syntactically and semantically primitive character as argued for in Schmerling (1982). The data we consider support the dynamic, non-uniform approach to phrase structure building first advanced in Krivochen (2015); they are not compatible with contemporary syntactic frameworks that decline to recognize paratactic structures.

In the present work we will present and analyze some basic processes at the local and global level in linguistic derivations that do not seem to conform to either Markovian or Turing-like computation, particularly as they are modeled within generative linguistics. We will first present briefly the working hypothesis and then focus on the empirical domain. At the same time, we will argue that a model of the mind that assumes that computational processes are uniform (i.e., that a single formal grammar can and should be used to model the generation of all cognitive structures) is necessarily insufficient as it either falls short or assigns too much structure to different stimuli, and thus computationally mixed formal models are to be invoked in order to pursue a fuller understanding of mental processes within a unified framework.

[Old and outdated, but fun all the same. At the time, it was a reaction to Collins and Stabler's paper 'A formalization of Minimalist Syntax' (published in 2016). The few things that are worth keeping from this piece have been incorporated into my thesis and recent papers on graph theoretic analyses]

In this paper we attempt a logic-mathematical formalization of the program for (linguistic) investigation that we have called Radical Minimalism, in order to make the model fully explicit and reveal its potential to be applied not only sub-personally and to the language domain exclusively, but to any physical system one considers. For those purposes, we have devised a logical model of syntax (understood as a general-purpose free and unbounded generative algorithm), with which we capture the properties of mental workspaces and the cognitive organization of the phenomenological reality. We will combine our Strong Radically Minimalist Thesis with Tegmark’s (2007) Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, and analyze how both strengthen in interaction gaining in empirical coverage and theoretical weight. The aim is to formalize a possibility for the study of language as a physical system from an interdisciplinary perspective: a joint work between Formal Linguistics, Logic, Physics and Mathematics.

El presente trabajo propone profundizar en el desarrollo de herramientas formales para el estudio de las lenguas clásicas, en particular la lengua latina. Nuestro foco en este trabajo será la noción de “ligamiento”, es decir, dependencias referenciales entre constituyentes, particularmente elementos anafóricos (pronombres reflexivos y recíprocos) y sus antecedentes. Basándonos en problemas concretos que aparecen en la consideración de ejemplos atestiguados en los textos, cuestionaremos los presupuestos Chomskyanos y proporcionaremos una explicación alternativa, más elegante y simple. El objetivo es proveer al lector de una serie de herramientas teóricas explícitas que pueda utilizar en el análisis de la lengua latina, en la que nos enfocaremos y de la cual analizaremos ejemplos problemáticos para teorías transformacionales ortodoxas; así como ampliar el análisis a cualquier otra lengua.

In computer science, divide and conquer (D&C) is a top-down algorithm design paradigm based on multibranched recursion. D&C works by recursively breaking down a problem into sub-problems of the same (or a related) type, until these become simple enough to be solved directly. The solutions are then combined to give a solution to the original problem. The present work identifies D&C algorithms assumed within contemporary syntactic theory, and discusses the limits of their applicability in the realms of the syntax-semantics and syntax-morpho-phonology interfaces, including empirical evidence from coordinated structures and dependencies within auxiliary chains. We will propose that D&C algorithms fall short given a ‘mixed’ approach to the structure of linguistic phrase markers.

In this paper we will analyze the behavior of relational adjectives in Spanish, revisiting the analysis made in Fábregas (2007, forthcoming) under the light of Radical Minimalism (Krivochen, 2011 a, b, c). We will take a look at the Relational Semantic Structure (RSS) of the category Adjective, following the lines of Mateu (2000 et. seq.), and then analyze their syntactic instantiation and derivation to build fully-fledged DPs.

Keywords: Radical Minimalism, roots, procedural nodes, relational adjectives, syntax-semantics interface.

(Written in English) In this paper we analyze the phenomenon of raising-to-subject. After a very brief introduction to the topic, we deal with two main problems: the underlying Relational Semantic Structure (Mateu, 2000, 2002, 2008) and its relevance to syntax, and the "narrow syntax" of raising. In the end, we propose a radically minimalist theory of raising in which we claim that we only have one clause with a Split TP instead of what has been traditionaly proposed, the presence of two clauses and an extraction from a subordinate TP or phi-domain (Chomsky, 1999, Hornstein, 2003, Grohmann, 2003, 2004), that is, we claim that there is no raising at all: "raising verbs" are in fact Modality expressions. Comments will be welcome.

Corrected version: 'Verbos de Ascenso como Expresiones Modales'

En este trabajo nos proponemos analizar la sintaxis y semántica de los cuantificadores y determinantes desde la interfaz entre la gramátic generativa y la Teoría de la Relevancia. Hacemos una revisión de la teoría descripcionalista de Russell sobre la referencia para luego proponer nuestra propia visión, en el marco del Minimalismo Radical (Krivochen, 2011a et. seq.)

La noción de economía es fundamental en tanto rectora de todos los procesos cognitivos. En la Facultad del Lenguaje, desde la perspectiva minimalista, economía es eliminación de: (a) elementos superfluos de las representaciones y (b) pasos superfluos en las derivaciones, es decir, eliminación de todos aquellos elementos que aumenten la complejidad computacional sin estar estrictamente motivados por requerimientos de interfaz. La búsqueda de mecanismos derivacionales menos costosos computacionalmente ha llevado, a lo largo de la historia de la Gramática Generativa, a proponer diferentes maneras de establecer un ámbito derivacional restringido (i.e, local) para la aplicación de operaciones sintácticas. En este trabajo hacemos una revisión crítica de las concepciones principales sobre el concepto de fase (y conceptos afines y derivados), la restricción de localidad más importante en el PM. Luego de presentar los enfoques, y ventajas y desventajas de cada uno, propondremos una teoría de las fases aplicable a todos los módulos mentales que intenta eliminar la mayor cantidad posible de estipulaciones, persiguiendo un modelo “más minimalista”.

En este trabajo reanalizaremos una estructura sintáctica que ha sido objeto de estudio en la Gramática Generativa desde la década del ’70 (por ejemplo, Chomsky & Lasnik, 1977): las estructuras de “ascenso”. En estas estructuras hay un verbo que selecciona una cláusula subordinada no finita, en la que un argumento recibe rol temático pero no caso, produciéndose un movimiento-A hacia la cláusula matriz para recibir caso. Este sistema implica grandes complicaciones a nivel teórico y empírico, por lo que intentaremos reemplazar esa teoría por la de que los así llamados “verbos de ascenso” (parecer como ejemplo prototípico) son en realidad auxiliares con un significado modal. Así, no hay dos cláusulas, sino sólo una, con un dictum y un modus, en la que el verbo de ascenso es en realidad un núcleo con rasgos modales. Comenzaremos caracterizando la noción de modalidad en diferentes ámbitos y luego nos centraremos en el estudio de la sintaxis y la semántica de los verbos de ascenso desde la convergencia entre generativismo, Relevancia y conceptos de lógica modal.

In this paper we address the nature, syntax and semantics of clitics. Our focus is on the syntax-semantics interface, since we will attempt to provide a model for interpretation of clitics and their associate constituents. We will address the problem of so-called “clitic doubling”, to see the semantic consequences that different syntactic configurations have, and investigate on how syntactic operations are triggered by the need to generate interface effects. We will put forth the thesis that clitics are procedural elements whose function is to license the presence of their associates and provide the semantic interface with instructions as to how to manipulate those sortal associates. Our argumentation will take elements from formal syntax (Radical Minimalism) and semantics-pragmatics (Relevance Theory) to configure an interface-based approach in which no phenomenon is studied in substantive isolation, but taking into account the interaction between different components of the system. Our aim is to provide prospects for a unified theory of the syntax-semantics of clitics, drawing on data from Spanish to support our theoretical claims.

Keywords: Radical Minimalism; Relevance Theory; Clitic Doubling; Spanish; Case Marking

This collaborative book has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, the authors present a new framework – Radical Minimalism. The development of such a framework, with a strong basis on mathematics and physics, was born out of the conviction that, if language is really a natural object, there is no a priori reason to study it in isolation from other natural systems. On the other hand, this work represents a significant simplification of the theory of displacement and so-called «empty categories» within the latest development of Chomsky’s Strong Minimalist Hypothesis, applying Occam’s razor and fulfilling Lakatos’ requirements for scientific evolution. Radical Minimalism thus accounts not only for the phenomena orthodox minimalism has explanations for, but also for empirical problems that have not yet been taken into consideration.

El fenómeno de la no configuracionalidad, u “orden libre de palabras”, ha sido estudiado tanto por gramáticas tradicionales, estructuralistas, generativistas, y cognitivas. Dos grandes tendencias pueden distinguirse en estos estudios: el orden libre de palabras involucra una operación transformacional, que desplaza constituyentes a partir de un orden subyacente por razones pragmáticas, o, frecuentemente, por cuestiones meramente intra-teóricas, como la eliminación de rasgos no interpretables (generativismo ortodoxo); o bien, el orden de palabras nunca es producto de una operación de movimiento, sino que es la proyección directa de entradas léxicas altamente especificadas respecto de su distribución (Green, 2011), posiblemente en una estructura de frase “plana” (Culicover & Jackendoff, 2005). En este trabajo propondremos una tercera opción, que involucra los conceptos lógico-filosóficos de type y token, y elimina las operaciones transformacionales al a vez que simplifica el lexicón. Nuestro modelo sostiene la preeminencia de la semántica por sobre la morfo-fonología, y rechaza la independencia de la sintaxis, ya que toda representación simbólica estructurada es sintáctica, aunque no sea lingüística (por ejemplo, estructuras conceptuales-intencionales). Pondremos a prueba las predicciones de nuestra teoría con dos fragmentos del Libro I de las ‘Metamorfosis’ de Ovidio, correspondientes a la descripción de las aetas aurea y férrea respectivamente; en la medida en que intentaremos demostrar que las variaciones en el orden de palabras que encontramos en cada fragmento son una función del contenido semántico, y no meramente un artefacto estético. La metodología, que haremos explícita, puede perfectamente aplicarse a cualquier otro texto latino, problemáticos para las teorías tradicionales (ver Spevak, 2010 para discusión), por lo que la propuesta tiene un valor agregado en la proyección para futuras investigaciones.

In contrast to what has happened in other sciences, the establishment of what the study object of linguistics as an autonomous discipline is has not been resolved yet. Ranging from external explanations of languages as a system (Saussure 1916), the existence of an mental innate language capacity or UG (Chomsky 1965, 1981, 1995), the cognitive complexity of the mental language capacity and the acquisition of languages in use (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008; Croft & Cruise 2008, Evans & Levinson 2009 et al.) most, if not all, theoretical approaches provide explanations that somehow isolated our discipline from developments in other major sciences, such as physics and evolutionary biology. In the present article I will present some of the basic issues regarding the current debate in the discipline, in order to pull out some problems regarding the modern assumptions on language. Furthermore, a new proposal on how to approach linguistic phenomena will be given, regarding what I call “the main three” basic problems our discipline has to face ulteriorly. Finally, some preliminary ideas on a new paradigm of Linguistics which tries to answer these three basic problems will be presented, mainly based in the recently-born formal theory called Radical Minimalism (Krivochen 2011a, b) and what I dub Memetic Linguistics and Linguistic Engineering.

El presente trabajo pretende continuar la línea inaugurada por Krivochen & Luder (2012) en el desarrollo de herramientas formales para el estudio de las lenguas clásicas, en particular la lengua latina. Tales herramientas, desarrolladas a partir de métodos axiomático-formales, son puestas a prueba con los datos concretos y nos ayudan a comprender mejor no solamente el funcionamiento de una lengua como sistema sino el sustrato cognitivo-biológico que posibilita el desarrollo de tal sistema. Nuestro foco en este trabajo será la noción de “localidad” en las derivaciones, que ha sido el centro de gran parte de los estudios de orientación Chomskyana la última década. Basándonos en problemas concretos que aparecen en la consideración de ejemplos atestiguados en los textos, cuestionaremos los presupuestos Chomskyanos y proporcionaremos una explicación alternativa, más elegante y simple. El objetivo es proveer al lector de una serie de herramientas teóricas que pueda utilizar en el análisis de la lengua latina, así como cualquier otra lengua.

These Pixelscapes were found within a photograph of Kazimir Malevich (Ukranian-born artist, 1878-1935) via magnification, filter treatment (halftone) and isolation of the pixel(s) in Photoshop. Malevich founded the art movement, Suprematism in Moscow, 1913 as a parallel to Constructivism. Suprematism ("supremacy of forms") is a study in abstraction conceived in itself ... non-objective and not related to anything except geometric shapes and colors ... and a precursor to Minimalism.

Apologies for cross-posting. This coauthored paper/chapter, written by Peter Kosta and myself, was recognized by academia.edu automatically. The system suggests that I reupload it.
The paper offers a description of Slavic word order systems from the viewpoint of formal typology based on such notions as syntactic type, parametric settings, basic and derived order, linearization constraint, constituency, movement, spell-out, cliticity, clitic clusters, syntax-prosody interface, and grammaticalization. The general aim is to classify Slavic word order systems with clitics on the basis of syntactic constraints without dependence on hypotheses about language-specific properties of prosodically deficient elements.
NB! This paper should be cited as indicated here:
Peter Kosta and Anton Zimmerling. Slavic clitic systems in a typological perspective. The Nominal Structure in Slavic and Beyond. Ed. by Schürcks, Lilia / Giannakidou, Anastasia / Etxeberria, Urtzi. (Studies in Generative Grammar 116). Mouton de Gruyter, 2013, pp. 441-490.
There is considerable (parametric) variation in the citations found elsewhere, so I am fixing the relevant points.
1. The correct order of the authors is: Peter Kosta and Anton Zimmerling.
2. The correct title is: Slavic clitic systems in a typological perspective.
3. The year of issue is 2013, check here on degryter.com: https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/204141. There are numerous wrong citations (2011, 2012, 2014 etc.) found on the web.
4. The correct page numbers are p. 441-490, see here: https://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9781614512790/9781614512790.441/9781614512790.441.xml

The paper offers a description of Slavic word order systems from the viewpoint of formal typology basing on such notions as syntactic type, parametric settings, basic and derived order, linearization constraints, constituency, movement, spell-out, cliticity, clitic clusters, syntax-prosody interface, grammaticalization, Relativized Minimality, Radical Minimalism. The general aim is to classify Slavic word order systems with clitics on the basis of syntactic constraints without sticking to hypotheses about language-specific properties of prosodically deficient elements and to provide a viable typological classification, which can be verified by data from other world’s languages. After having introduced the notion clitic cluster vs. clitic template, we are concentrating on 2.1 Cliticization into DP/NP and on 2.2. Clusters and the Template Principle. We also give insigths into how 2.3. Clause-level Clitics and Clusterization in Slavic can be analyzed and how 2.4. Syntactic Clitics and Prosodic clitics can be treated and we give an overview about 2.5. Areal Slavic Types of a Clitic Template and about 2.6. 2P Clitics and Non-clusterizing Clitics. In 2.7. we adopt the hypothesis of Comp/XP as a universal clitic basis, since it predicts the placement of Slavic clausal 2P elements in the best possible way and is typologically more reliable than the alternative hypothesis of 2P as a primarily phonetic phenomenon (cf. Halpern (1996) for a different approach). In secttion 2.8. entitled Tobler-Musaffia’s Law, 2P-clitics and VA-clitics Revisited, we try to put forward a claim that the description of word order systems of clausal clitics should base on syntactic constraints and be maximally independent from conjectures on restrictions imposed by allegedly purely phonetic or lexical properties of clitics. The further sections of this article include the following: 3. Barrier Theory and Derived Word Orders with Clitics 3.1. Blind and Selective Barriers 3.2. Communicative and Grammaticalized Barriers 3.3. Barriers and Verb Movement 3.4. Barriers and Clitic Movement 3.5. Multiple Barriers and Blocking of the Barrier Effect 4. Slavic Word Order Systems 4.1. Standard W-systems 4.2. W+-systems 4.3. W*-systems 4.4. C-systems 4.5. The Unity and Diversity of Slavic Word Order Systems 5. Slavic VA Clitics as Strong 2P clitics: the VA vs 2P Distinction Revisited 6. Further Problems and Perspectives: Possessor Raising 7. Conclusions"

El presente trabajo propone profundizar en el desarrollo de herramientas formales para el estudio de las lenguas clásicas, en particular la lengua latina. Nuestro foco en este trabajo será la noción de “localidad” en las derivaciones sintácticas, que ha sido el centro de gran parte de los estudios de orientación Chomskyana durante la última década. La propuesta se basa en redefinir algunos conceptos básicos que rigen las dependencias referenciales entre constituyentes, particularmente elementos anafóricos (reflexivos y recíprocos) y sus antecedentes. Basándonos en problemas concretos que aparecen en la consideración de ejemplos atestiguados en los textos, cuestionaremos los presupuestos Chomskyanos y proporcionaremos una explicación alternativa, más elegante y simple. El objetivo es proveer al lector de una serie de herramientas teóricas explícitas que pueda utilizar en el análisis de la lengua latina, en la que nos enfocaremos y de la cual analizaremos ejemplos problemáticos para teorías transformacionales ortodoxas; así como ampliar el análisis a cualquier otra lengua.