DIFFERENTIATION AND REDUCTION IN SYNTACTIC THEORY - A CASE-STUDY

This article presents a case study of the reduction of the Case Filter to a Visibility Principle governing theta role assignment (see Chomsky 1981, 1985). The reduced, undifferentiated system, lacking the Case Filter, is shown to be unable to predict certain contrasts in degrees of (un)grammaticality. A differentiated model incorporating the Case Filter encounters no such difficulty. Following Chomsky (1965), I conclude that the differentiated system, capable of accounting for degrees of (un)grammaticality, is preferable in that it attains a higher degree of empirical adequacy than does its reduced counterpart. The type of evidence and argumentation employed here, as well as the proposed grammaticality metric, are completely generalizable and thereby provide a diagnostic for determining the precise nature of differentiation and reduction throughout the syntactic component. © 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers.