In Ernst's The Syntax of Adjuncts (2002), the author says in a note that he "will continue to use GB terms like D-Structure, S-Structure, and base-generation with the understanding that they may refer to their equivalents in Minimalist theory." I am aware that there are no S- and D-structure in the minimalist program. The question is, what are the equivalents the author is referring to, and how can one refer to them otherwise? Pre- and post-move, for example? Thanks in advance.
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- 2I'm not aware of any specific terminology for them; if you want to be technical you could call them "the structure after applying Merge" and "the structure after applying Agree", but pre-movement and post-movement seems perfectly understandable.Draconis– Draconis ♦2025-06-15 22:01:55 +00:00Commented Jun 15 at 22:01
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First a caveat: so far as I am aware, there is no well-defined consensus view of what constitutes a Minimalist grammar. For what it's worth, here is my understanding. The notion of S-structure remains more or less the same in a minimalist grammar. A derivation creates a structure which corresponds in a straightforward way to a string. ("straightforward way" means there is a linearization procedure and Lexical Insertion procedure that converts the groupings of formatives into a string of words. Often, this isn't simple.) The notion of D-structure is what's mostly been lost in a minimalist grammar. D-structure was conceived of as a syntactic structure---a parse tree---that contained all the formatives that the sentence contains. The derivation then manipulates this structure into one that corresponds to the string which in pronounced. In a minimalist grammar, derivations start with a set of formatives. The rules construct the phrase markers from those formatives. The older notion of a D-structure on this view is (or could be) one of the representations that exist in the derivation; but it won't be the thing that derivation starts with. Derivations in Minimalism are conceived of as a process that takes formatives (rough: morphemes) to an S-structure.
