Is a unified locality theory nothing more than a pipe dream? (And why that may not be such a bad thing)

This talk will examine two kinds of locality constraints in the grammar: successive-cyclicity and the cyclic (piecemeal) spellout of syntactic structure to the interfaces. I’ll first survey the relevant empirical phenomena and then take a closer look at Phase theory, whose ambition is to provide a unified account of locality in these two domains. We’ll see that there are both conceptual and empirical challenges for the proposed unification. On the empirical side, I’ll present a case study of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) adjectives, arguing that they force the spellout of syntactic structure to the interfaces, but do not force (in fact, do not allow) movement to proceed successive-cyclically from their domain. I’ll then propose that featural Relativized Minimality can just as easily account for the original evidence for successive-cyclicity, as well as help make sense of the BCS data. A separate mechanism, Transfer, will be argued to regulate the spellout of syntactic structure to the interfaces. I’ll talk through the plausible functional grounding of both Minimality and Transfer. I’ll conclude the discussion by looking at a few additional examples of syntactic locality phenomena that have traditionally been analyzed in Phase-theoretic terms, but that receive better explanations in a Minimality-based system.