MULTIPLE SPELL-OUT†

Abstract

A presently unmotivated assumption within the Minimalist program is that the rule of Spell-out applies only once. This paper argues that such a residue of the level of S-structure is undesirable, and liberalizing Spell-out to apply as many times as it needs to, up to economy, has several pleasant features, as well as various intriguing consequences which are worth pursuing. The model that emerges is radically derivational, so much so that in the end the issue is raised of whether the PF and LF components organize themselves into traditional levels of representation. I Deducing the Base-step of the Linear Correspondence Axiom One of the central desiderata of the Minimalist Program is reducing all substantive principles to interface (or bare output) conditions, and all formal principles to economy conditions. As a result, much energy has been devoted to rethinking constraints and phenomena which do not appear to conform to this desideratum as more elementary ones, in the process focusing the data base. This paper is an attempt to reduce a version of Kayne's (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA) to more minimalist bases. Chomsky (1995:chapter 4) already limits the place for the LCA in the grammar. Kayne's version of the axiom is a formal condition on the shape of phrase markers (PM). Chomsky's (both for empirical and conceptual reasons) is a condition that operates at the point of Spell-out, and because of PF demands. The intuition for Kayne is that a non-linearized PM is ill-formed, in and of itself, whereas for Chomsky such an object is ill-formed only at PF~hence the demand to linearize it upon branching to this component. Chomsky's version is more minimalist in that the linearization condition is taken to follow from bare output conditions. The axiom has both a formal and a substantive character. The formal part demands the linearization of a complex object that has been assembled by the Merge operation, which produces mere associations among terms. A visual image to keep in mind is a mobile by Alexander Calder: the hanging pieces relate to each other in a fixed way, but are not linearly ordered with respect to one another; one way to linearize this object is to freeze it in time, for instance through a photograph. The substantive part of Kayne's axiom does the job of the

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