Optimal Cycles

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Gregory M. Kobele
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439622645

The primary aim of the project is to investigate the nature of cycles in (minimalist) syntax and its interfaces, with a particular focus on semantics. A primary focus of this investigation is to what extent the cycles can be considered optimal. An obvious contender for the meaning of optimality in this sense is size - how big must the cycles be in order to allow for interface interpretation? One cycle is more optimal than another just in case it contains fewer steps of structure building. Cycles are optimal tout court if structure building and interpretation are perfectly interleaved (interpretation happens after each step). A main goal of the present project is to determine whether LF as a syntactic level is necessary, without fundamentally changing the syntactic analyses involved. The goal of this project is to pursue optimal cyclicity at the interfaces to syntax. Both interfaces (to PF and to LF) have been shown optimally cyclic in the context of minimalist grammars, but, like much computational work, at a high degree of idealization. I wish here to clarify, and push these results a bit further, adding more complexity, bringing the idealizations closer to reality. The current directly compositional semantics for MGs covers only (DP-)scope and argument structure. It shows however that standard minimalist accounts of the dissociation between theta and scope positions can be semantically interpreted in an optimally cyclic way. These have long stood as a main motivation for the existence of a syntactic level of LF, as discussed above. However, other phenomena have been argued to motivate LF as well. A main goal of the present project is to determine whether LF as a syntactic level is necessary, /without/ fundamentally changing the syntactic analyses involved. Accordingly, binding and ellipsis will be investigated, to determine whether they yield to an optimally cyclic analysis. Although focussed on the syntax-semantics interface, I also plan to investigate extensions to the PF interface in minimalist grammars. I aim in particular to answer the following questions: - Q1 What is the relation between cooper storage and LF-interpretation? - Q2 Can the elliptical phenomena which have been used to motivate LF-interpretation be analyzed in an optimally cyclic manner? - Q3 How can pronominal binding be made sense of in a directly compositional minimalist framework? - Q4 What does an optimally cyclic map from syntax to morphology look like?

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