ABSTRACT

The Minimalist Program claims that only two notions of locality are necessary: Phasal Locality and intervention locality (in the form of the Minimal Link Condition). This chapter asks whether the unification of the two is possible or even desirable. An argument against unification would consist in showing that a process A obeys one locality condition and doesn’t obey the other and that a process B does exactly the reverse. Two phenomena are considered that fit this description: respectively, interpretation and Clitic Placement. Their contrasting behavior in the French faire-construction confirms that they shouldn’t be unified: Clitic Placement obeys Phasal Locality, respectively interpretation obeys some form of Minimality. The theoretical implications of these findings for the theory of locality and the architecture of grammar are examined in the conclusion.