Local economy and Generalized Pied-Piping

Abstract

In developing and elaborating the theory of Attract-F, Chomsky (1995) proposes the mechanism of Generalized Pied-Piping. According to Chomsky, when a formal feature of a head H attracts a matching feature of a category Ψ, other formal features of a category Ψ can be moved automatically, without any cost in terms of the general economy condition, to the target H together with the feature that is attracted to H. In this paper it will be demonstrated, contra Chomsky's (1995) proposal, that the application of Generalized Pied-Piping should be somehow constrained by the economy condition as long as the computation involved in the grammar of the human language (what Chomsky 1995 calls C_HL) is conducted only in a strictly derivational manner. This paper, therefore, claims that Generalized Pied-Piping, just like Move/Attract, is a kind of syntactic operation subject to the general economy condition under the view that C_HL is strictly derivational.