M.W. (Marjolein) Talsma, MA

I am working on a project implementing Theta Theory in the Minimalist Program.

The relationship between predicates and their arguments is traditionally captured in Chomsky's Theta Theory (1981), although many other versions of this theory have been proposed since then. These traditional accounts rely heavily on additional mechanisms outside of narrow syntax. The Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1991; 1993; 1995 and subsequent work) aims to provide a framework that is as simple and elegant as possible. As such, the only mechanism to create dependencies (e.g. the dependency between predicates and arguments) is Merge. Merge is an operation that orders elements into a hierarchical structure (Zwart 2009; 2017). In the present project I aim to design a minimalist version of the Theta Theory, where argument structure is a function of Merge.