Branan, Kenyon and Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine, to appear.
“Locality and (minimal) search.”
Cambridge Handbook of the Minimalist Program.
In this chapter prepared for the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook of Minimalism, we attempt to explicate the procedural approach to locality, which aims to explain syntactic locality restrictions based on the behavior of a search procedure in the grammar. We discuss explicit options for the search algorithm underlying "minimal search," the need to distinguish probe interaction from satisfaction, and the shape of the search space. We describe how versions of this procedural approach can derive a wide range of attested relative and absolute locality effects.