Non-movement-based approaches
This chapter compares movement-based conceptions of grammar and of unbounded dependency constructions with their construction- and non-movement-based antithesis. In particular, the focus of this chapter is on how unification and construction-based grammar provides not only a better handle on the phenomena than the MP from a linguistic perspective, but also from a psycholinguistic point of view. The flexibility of non-movement-based accounts allows a much wider and much more complex array of unbounded dependency patterns because it rejects the basic idea that extracted phrases start out as being embedded in sentence structure, and instead views the propagation of all information in sentence structure as a local and distributed (featural) process. The grammatical theory discussed in this chapter is also more consistent with extant models of human language processing than the MP, and demonstrably allows for efficient incremental and probabilistic language models of both comprehension and production.