Chains in Minimalism
February 12‐13, 2011
Yokohama National University
Yokohama, Japan


Invited Speakers:

This international workshop, which will be held at Yokohama National University (YNU) in Japan, is part of a four year research project, now in its final year, on "The Role of Chains and their Mechanisms of Interpretation in Minimalism", , funded by a Grant‐in‐Aid for Scientific Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The 2 day workshop will feature talks by some of the project members as well as by two invited keynote speakers. In addition, a number of slots will be made available for paper‐presentations solicited through this open call for papers and selected based on anonymous review of abstracts by two or more reviewers.

The concept of 'chain' has long played a central role in the theory of generative grammar. Yet the precise nature of chains is still not well understood. Furthermore, within minimalism, many new questions about chains have been raised, including concerns about their very existence as syntactic objects. Our research project is focused on trying to address and answer the following sorts of questions:
  1. Do chains exist? Is there empirical evidence for the existence of chains as syntactic entities of some sort?
  2. To what degree, if any, does the notion of chain play a crucial role in the analysis of particular linguistic phenomena, e.g., control, anaphora, quantifier scope ambiguities, reconstruction, speaker preferences, locality of movement, resumption strategies, etc.?
  3. If chains exist, what kind of objects are they? How should they be defined? What are the computational mechanisms underlying chain formation?
  4. What role, if any, do chains play at the interfaces? What are the mechanisms of chain interpretation at, say, PF or LF (or their variants in terms of multiple spell‐out models)?

Program [Download PDF]

アクセス案内 [ Download PDF ]
(Directions in Japanese; if you need information on how to reach the workshop site in English, please contact the organizers at the email address below)


CALL For Papers

Workshop Organizers:
Roger Martin (YNU)
Tomohiro Fujii (YNU)

Email: chains.ynu/at_mark/gmail.com