Current Studies in Linguistics Series 32, MIT Press

DELTA, 16, 221-43, Unicamp, Brazil One of the cornerstones of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program is the role played by economy. This paper discusses different ways in which Chomsky’s notion of economy in linguistics can be understood, given current views on dynamic systems and, in particular, on evolution in biological systems. Um dos pontos principais do Programa […]

Theoretical Linguistics, 25 (1), 31-73 Language presents paradigmatic regularities, together with the usual syntagmatic ones that syntax is designed to capture. This article proposes a way of deriving systematic hierarchies by analyzing linguistic categories through the algebraic structure of numbering systems (hence by way of dimensions, each recursively defined on the previous). The goal is […]

Possessors, predicates and movement in the Determiner Phrase, 361-382 Sentences like the one above pose a well-known difficulty for the now standard theory of names. What makes Antony Antony, and not Brutus, is (in the Kripkean view) the fact that Antony originates’ from a certain hunk of matter’and has some reasonable properties concerning a given’substance’essential […]

Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 14 (4), 749-810

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Current Issues in Comparative Grammar, 338-345 It probably is uncontroversial that the determiner cliticization paradigm discussed in this chapter obeys some locality restriction in terms of government (or a similar notion). Whether the locality condition is syntactic or phonological in nature may be an open question, but I have nothing to say about the second […]

Current issues in comparative grammar, 257-295 Some time in the High Middle Ages, the Romance languages created a determiner system from chunks of the demonstrative paradigm of Latin. This language did not have definite articles, nor did it have third person pronouns—it used demonstratives to refer to third persons. In fact, in many (though not […]

Small clauses, 179-206

Discourse configurational languages 26, 79-123