Recent psycholinguistic evidence suggests that human parsing of moved elements is ‘active’, and perhaps even ‘hyper-active’: it seems that a leftward-moved object is related to a verbal position rapidly, perhaps even before the transitivity information associated with the verb is available to the listener. This paper presents a formal, sound and complete parser for Minimalist Grammars whose search space contains branching points that we can identify as the locus of the decision to perform this kind of active gap-finding. This brings formal models of parsing into closer contact with recent psycholinguistic theorizing than was previously possible.

This paper presents a left-corner parser for minimalist grammars. The relation between the parser and the grammar is transparent in the sense that there is a very simple 1-1 correspondence between derivations and parses. Like left-corner context-free parsers, left-corner minimalist parsers can be non-terminating when the grammar has empty left corners, so an easily computed left-corner oracle is defined to restrict the search.