Antecedents and Consequents

This chapter situates the present system within the tradition it comes from, in the process examining foundational concerns about the overall architecture and how this has influenced other lines of research. It begins by reviewing earlier models (the Extended Standard Theory and the Principles and Parameters system) — precursors of the Minimalist Program — to show how the roots of how cyclicity is addressed in this book are very much within the spirit of earlier proposals. It then moves on to the best known cyclic system in contemporary studies, which proposes that derivations run transitioning from one phase to the next. It shows how this system is compatible with the MSO architecture, as they are addressing different aspects of cyclicity — a condition that makes good derivational sense. The theme of justifying the derivational nature of the linguistic architecture is further explored in the middle sections of the chapter. It concludes with two detailed case studies in the literature, which explicitly and creatively use the MSO architecture to make predictions about reanalysis in parsing and specific conditions that arise in language development.