Sensing Tree Automata as a Model of Syntactic Dependencies

Various aspects of syntax have recently been characterized in subregular terms. However, these characterizations operate over very different representations, including string encodings of c-command relations as well as tiers projected from derivation trees. We present a way to unify these approaches via sensing tree automata over Minimalist grammar dependency trees. Sensing tree automata are deterministic top-down tree automata that may inspect the labels of all daughter nodes before assigning them specific states. It is already known that these automata cannot correctly enforce all movement dependencies in Minimalist grammars, but we show that this result no longer holds if one takes into account several well-established empirical restrictions on movement. Sensing tree automata thus furnish a strong yet uniform upper bound on the complexity of syntactic dependencies.