ABSTRACT
In the Principles and Parameters theory representational conditions on various levels carried most of the burden of restricting syntax. In the minimalist framework representational conditions will only hold at interface levels, the only levels that exist. Let us assume the strong version of the minimalist hypothesis according to which syntactic interface conditions are “bare output conditions,” that is conditions forced on syntax by the interpretive systems that are fed by the syntactic computations. Suppose furthermore that most of the effects of representational conditions of the Principles and Parameters theory turn out to be the effects of either bare output conditions or of conditions holding within the syntax-external systems. If so, then we may expect the syntactic computation, whose task is to assemble interface representations from a set of lexical items, to be near-trivial.
