Towards a theory of syntactic workspaces: neighbourhoods and distances in a lexicalised grammar

Abstract Recent work on structure building and mapping in Minimalist syntax makes explicit reference to workspaces; however, it is still an underexplored area. This paper is an attempt to (a) analyse the notion of ‘workspace’ as used in current Minimalist syntax and (b) provide a definition of ‘syntactic workspace’ that can help us capture interesting empirical phenomena. In doing this, we confront set-theoretic and graph-theoretic approaches to syntactic structure in terms of the operations that can affect syntactic objects and how their properties are related to the definition of workspace. We analyse the consequences of conceptualising ‘syntax’ as a set of operations that affect local regions of the workspace, defining directed graphs.