ABSTRACT
The notion of chain, originally introduced in Chomsky (1982a), has acquired an important role in the theory of grammar known as the Government and Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981, especially Chapter 6; and 1982b). A chain can be intuitively characterized as a device to concisely represent properties of the transformational derivation at Structure. As a first approximation, the chain associated to a phrase moved n times consists of the phrase itself and its n traces. For instance, in the following S-structure the NP John is assigned the chain (John⋎ e′i, e“): 1
