ABSTRACT
As set out in earlier work, elegant syntax (ES) differs from the minimalist framework in several important respects.1 I shall elaborate here some remarks made earlier on those features of this approach that relate to the so-called representational – derivational issue. I argued that since chain and move express the same type of relation, a theory that contains both concepts is redundant, and, therefore, at least in the setting of ES, wrong.2 As has been also noted repeatedly, the issue is more general: there is a redundancy built into the architecture of theories that assume that both representations and derivations play a role in the competence theory of narrow syntax.3
