Minimal Search from Different Viewpoints

Abstract

In recent minimalist syntax, Minimal Search, MS plays the role of a bona fide 3rd factor principle, which is supposed to regulate most operations and algorithms in human language computation such as Merge, Agree, and labeling (Chomsky 2013, 2015, 2019a,b, 2021). A minimalist syntactician who seeks to explain syntactic phenomena in a particular language, hence, is doomed to revise his or her work that was based on old concepts about locality. In this paper, we will touch some concepts of locality, old or new, and try to find out potential problems that we can encounter when we pursue MS-based account of locality phenomena.