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Formalizing Feature Inheritance

2025/06/14 by Gregory Kobele, Lei Liu
#complexity #feature inheritance #minimalist grammars #minimalist syntax

paper · doi:10.7275/scil.3185

Abstract

Feature Inheritance is a prominent theoretical innovation in minimalist syntax, which takes it further from the formal framework of minimalist grammars, the best understood formalism for reasoning about minimalism. Feature inheritance involves movement targeting non-root positions, as well as simultaneous movement steps. This turns out to require a formally innocuous extension to minimalist grammars, leaving strong generative capacity and worst-case parsing complexity unchanged.

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