Locality and Left Periphery

Abstract

Abstract The goal of this chapter is to provide a new, refined formal characterization of the locality principle known as Relativized Minimality. At the same time, we will try to show how the study of locality interacts with the “cartographic approach,” the attempt to draw maps of syntactic configuratons as precise and detailed as possible. A fundamental discovery of modern formal linguistics is that, if the length and depth of syntactic representations is unbounded, core structural relations are local. According to the Relativized Minimality approach, a local relation is one that must be satisfied in the smallest environment in which it can be satisfied. One traditional implementation of this idea is that, in a configuration like (1), a local structural relation cannot hold between X and Y if Z is a potential bearer of the relevant relation and Z intervenes between X and Y.