Phases and Complexity in Phrase Structure Building

The Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995–2001) sketches a model that aims to be empirically adequate and theoretically motivated but that does not fit in any clear way with specific performance algorithms such as parsing or generation even though much emphasis is put on “interface properties”. In this paper I propose that a Minimalist Grammar formalization (an extension of Stabler’s 1997 proposal) can be used both in parsing and in generation if we re-orient the directionality of the Structure Building Operations (merge and move) and if we formalize the notion of phase (Chomsky 1999). This will help us to define generalized algorithms, suitable both for parsing and for generation, which are computationally tractable in dealing with ambiguities and long distance dependencies resolution.