Locality and Left Periphery

Locality and Left Periphery The goal of this paper is to provide a new, refined characterization of the principle known as Relativized Minimality, or RM (Rizzi 1990). At the same time, I will try to show how the study of locality interacts with the “cartographic approach”, the attempt to draw maps of syntactic configurations as precise and detailed as possible. The first part of the paper defines an approach to locality that formally implements RM as a feature-based, representational principle, a view that is briefly compared with other implementations proposed in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 2000). The second part deal with various empirical puzzles raised by selective locality effects in movement of adverbials. Such effects will turn out to be amenable to two theoretical ingredients: a detailed cartography of the left peripheral positions occupied by adverbs, and a proper typology of structural positions that RM is sensitive to.