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تسجيل

Cyclicity in the theory of (wh-)

المؤلف:  Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng and Norbert Corver

المصدر:  Wh-Movement Moving on

الجزء والصفحة:  C1-P10

2026-10-03

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Cyclicity in the theory of (wh-)

The principle of cyclic rule application, present in OWM, is also central to the minimalist conception of the computational system of human language. In Chomsky 1993, structure is said to be built ‘‘bottom up,’’ and this derivational process is said to be constrained by the Extension Condition: roughly speaking, application of (external) Merge or Move (i.e., internal Merge) to some structure K always leads to an extension of this structure, K*, which includes K as a proper part. As Chomsky notes, the Extension Condition yields a version of the strict cycle. Cyclicity also shows up in the context of the ‘‘timing’’ between syntax, on the one hand, and semantics and phonology, on the other. The idea is that in the course of a derivation, syntactic objects (so-called phases) can be transferred to the interface systems for spell-out and interpretation. Once this is done, the information that was part of the transferred objects is ‘‘forgotten’’ and no longer accessible to the computational system (cf. the Phase Impenetrability Condition), which should considerably reduce the load on memory (see Chomsky 2000, 2001). All this means that information is only locally available during the derivation of a linguistic expression.