Coordination Funds

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jochen Trommer
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439622645

Cyclic structure building (as in theMinimalist Program) and optimization (e.g, in Optimality Theory and Harmonic Grammar) are two central research areas of grammatical theory, but only a fraction of the research in both fields addresses their interaction. The goal of the research unit “Cyclic Optimization” is to explore the hypothesis that combining cyclicity and optimization achieves an added level of explanation not available to either alone: Cyclicity can substantially restrict the search space of optimization processes and explain why optimization is often surface-opaque, while optimization yields a principled account for the timing, size, and variability of cycles. In the first phase, the research unit has generated substantial progress in developing new theoretical tools for modeling the integration of cyclicity and optimization, and in charting new empirical areas providing evidence for the general approach. The application for the second phase has three major goals. First, to put the obtained empirical generalizations on firmer ground by extending the domains of their application. Second, to integrate the results obtained in different architectures employing Cyclic Optimization. And, third, relating the theoretical and empirical results by a more general investigation of how the basic mechanisms of Cyclic Optimization make testable empirical-typological predictions. The central theoretical concept in this enterprise is an extended notion of Encapsulation which we use to capture not only the postulate of modularity (i.e. the informational separation on representations of different types), but also the informational separation of optimization in single cycles of the same type. The projects in the second phase thus have an additional focus on the emergent empirical consequences of modularity, specific grammatical representations, and cyclic Encapsulation.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5175: Cyclic Optimization