ABSTRACT
It is proposed by Chomsky (1995b), on the basis of a suggestion made by John Frampton, that the operation of movement be reinterpreted as “attraction”: “movement” of α to the neighbourhood of K should be thought of as K attracting the relevant feature(s) of α for the latter to enter into a checking relation with K, rather than α moving to the neighbourhood of K to get its relevant features checked off. Chomsky (1995b) defines this basic operation of human language computation in the following form, incorporating the effect of the Minimal Link Condition (MLC) of Chomsky and Lasnik (1993) into the definition of the operation itself, to avoid the well-known problem of computational complexity arising with respect to economy considerations (see Chomsky 1995b for a fuller discussion on these matters, as well as expositions of technical concepts of the minimalist program).
Attract
K attracts F if F is the closest feature that can enter into a checking relation with a sublabel of K (where a sublabel of K is a feature of the zero-level projection of the head H(K) of K).
(Adapted from Chomsky 1995b: 297)
