Theoretical Comparative Syntax

9   An A-over-A perspective on locality

It is proposed by Chomsky (1995b), on the basis of a suggestion made by John Frampton, that the operation of movement be reinterpreted as “attraction”: “movement” of α to the neighbourhood of K should be thought of as K attracting the relevant feature(s) of α for the latter to enter into a checking relation with K, rather than α moving to the neighbourhood of K to get its relevant features checked off. Chomsky (1995b) defines this basic operation of human language computation in the following form, incorporating the effect of the Minimal Link Condition (MLC) of Chomsky and Lasnik (1993) into the definition of the operation itself, to avoid the well-known problem of computational complexity arising with ...