Noun Phrase Accessibility and Universal Grammar

Abstract

Current treatments of Passive in the literature on generative grammar may be roughly grouped into three types: sentential, lexical, and phrasal. Sentential treatments consider &s;passives&s; to be sentences derived from another sentence. Strictly lexical views are more recent in the generative literature. The idea behind the minimal domain principle (MDP) is that in defining a particular derivational function, whether of a lexical, phrase structural, transformational, or morphophonemic sort, we take the domain of definition of the function to be the smallest class level of structures on which it can be defined giving adequate results. The conception of Passive is assumed embedded in a conception of Core Grammar in which rules are stated generally using variables ranging over grammatical categories, and rules for particular languages are drawn from those in Core Grammar by specifying values for the variables in accordance with stipulated Parameter Conditions.