In search for Phases

In this paper, I examine Chomsky’s proposal that the phonological and semantic components interpret syntactic derivations before they are complete. According to Chomsky, syntactic representations are built up from the bottom, and at particular stages, called “phases”, the result of the derivation is interpreted semantically and phonologically. In the past, authors have determined what constitutes phases by way of reconstruction effects, which can be used to determine how a syntactic derivation has occurred. This paper argues against this method, and claims that we should use the locality condition employed for determining anaphor-antecedent relationship instead.