Peninsulas and Probes

[sergi balari]

First, a geographical remark. Karel, Carl, some peninsulas may be worse
than islands, especially Iberic ones (take a Portugal more or less).

Probe: Well, Liz, a 'probe' is a collection of (uninterpretable)
features that 'probe' down a tree structure within some specified local
domain until it finds some element with which the agreement relation
holds, Once this happens, the agreeing element is copied (via MERGE) to
the specifier position of the head that sent the probe. This may not be
a notational variant of SLASH, but it looks very much like it (or, for
that matter, to LFG Functional Uncertainty), and more so if you take
into account that extraction in the MP is now traceless and erstwhile
traces are now exact copies of the whole phrase being 'moved' (there is
not yet a notion of LOCAL features in the MP, but wait... we may soon
hear about Probe-able features [is that word formation indecent enough?]
that get copied). In fact, if I got the whole story correctly (which is
unlikely), in the MP there is no MOVE operation anymore, just AGREEMENT
(of features) and MERGE. So...

So long.
Sergio

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Sergio Balari Ravera
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Àrea de Lingüística General
Departament de Filologia Catalana
Facultat de Lletres, Edifici B
E-09193 Bellaterra (Barcelona)
Spain
Phone: +34 935 812 350 Fax: +34 935 812 782
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