ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses papers by Epstein, Kitahara, and Seely, related to Chomsky’s (2013, 2015) “labeling by minimal search” analysis. After providing a history of “labels,” some empirically (and explanatorily) advantageous consequences of Chomsky’s labeling by minimal search analysis are revealed, including that (i) it explains “obligatory exit” in A-movement without reference to Merge-over-Move, lexical arrays, and subarrays, or to the construct “phase” (motivated in Chomsky (2000)), at least suggesting the possibility of their eliminability, and (ii) it explains “obligatory halting” in key instances of criterial freezing (without appeal to the analytical apparatus proposed in either Epstein (1992) or Rizzi (2015)). These results are consistent with the twin (yet often implicit) goals of: (i) reducing Merge to its simplest and most unified form while (ii) concomitantly maximizing Merge’s explanatory effects. It is to be noted that this research is entirely continuous with the 65-year-old (scientific) enterprise of seeking to construct an explanatory theory of the format of descriptively adequate transformational and phrase structure rules (now unified under Merge) and to also explain the nature of the (apparent) constraints on transformational rule application, including when transformational application is obligatory (“obligatory exit”) and when it is prohibited (“freezing”), and why.
