Editing Minimalist program (section)

==== Dependency grammar ====
There is a trend in [[Minimalist grammar|minimalism]] that shifts from constituency-based to [[Dependency grammar|dependency]]-based structures. Minimalism falls under the dependency grammar umbrella by virtue of adopting bare phrase structure, label-less trees, and specifier-less syntax.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Osborne|first1=Timothy|last2=Putnam|first2=Michael|last3=Gross|first3=Thomas M.|date=2011|title=Bare phrase structure, label-less tress, and specifier-less syntax. Is Minimalism becoming a dependency grammar?|journal=The Linguistic Review|volume=28|issue=3|doi=10.1515/tlir.2011.009|s2cid=170269106}}</ref><ref name="jayaseelan2008">{{Cite journal|last=Jayaseelan|first=K.A.|date=2008|title=Bare Phrase Structure and Specifier-less Syntax|url=http://www.biolinguistics.eu|journal=[[Biolinguistics]]|volume=2|issue=1|pages=087–106|doi=10.5964/bioling.8623 |s2cid=119001119 |doi-access=free}}</ref>

* '''bare phrase structure''': [[Merge (linguistics)|merge]] does away with non-branching nodes and bar levels, which are replaced by minimal projections (X<sup>MIN</sup>) and maximal projections (X<sup>MAX</sup>):
** a '''minimal projection''' does not dominate other lexical items or categories
** a '''maximal projection''' is unable to project any higher.
* '''label-less trees''': to simplify phrase structures, Noam Chomsky argues that the labels of the category are unnecessary, and therefore do not need to be included, leading to what is now known as label-less trees. In lieu of a specific category in the projection, the [[Lexical semantics|lexical]] item that is classified as a head become its own label.
* '''specifier-less syntax''': the generalization of Abney's (1987) [[Determiner phrase|DP hypothesis]] gives rise to the development of specifier-less syntax. Lexical items that would have been analyzed as a specifier in earlier versions of X-bar theory—e.g. Determiners were introduced in [Spec,N]; Auxiliaries were introduced in [Spec,V]—become the heads of their own phrases. For example, D introduces NP as a complement; T introduces VP as a complement.