Locality and (minimal) search

Agreement and movement phenomena necessitate grammatical mechanisms for the establishment of dependencies, subject to certain locality constraints. In this chapter, we attempt to explicate a procedural approach to locality, which derives syntactic locality restrictions based on the behavior of a “minimal search” procedure in the grammar. We discuss explicit options for the search algorithm underlying “minimal search,” the need to distinguish probe interaction from satisfaction, and the shape of the search space. We describe how versions of this procedural approach can derive a wide range of attested relative and absolute locality effects.