Abstract
Minimality, the idea that government of an element can be blocked by an intervening governor, is simple and intuitively appealing; it is apparently of great utility in accounting for a wide variety of phenomena; and it has been very difficult to formulate in a manner that rules out all the relevant cases where government should be blocked while allowing government where necessary. The most influential version of minimality has been what Rizzi (1990) calls “rigid” minimality, by which an intervening head blocks government by any type of potential governor, regardless of category type. The central ECP-related proposal that Rizzi (1990) makes is to relativize minimality so that government is blocked only when competing governors match in some way, e.g., category level (X0 vs. XP) or A/A′ status. Before turning to Rizzi’s proposals, I will review briefly three earlier versions of minimality and the core phenomena which they have been adduced to account for so as to highlight the similarities and differences between Rizzi’s proposals and those which have come before. Two of these involve cases of heads blocking government by other heads, the other, Chomsky’s “rigid” minimality, involves heads blocking government by any potential governor.
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© 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Browning, M.A. (1996). Comments on Relativized Minimality. In: Freidin, R. (eds) Current Issues in Comparative Grammar. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 35. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0135-3_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0135-3_10
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