Numeration

Formal device used in the Minimalist Program. A numeration is a set that contains pairs of

1. the lexical items that will be used in a syntactic derivation and
2. an index that indicates how often each lexical item will be used in the derivation.

Example

(ii) is the numeration for the sentence in (i):

(i) The women built the airplanes
(ii) {<the,2>, <women,1>, <built,1>, <airplanes,1>,
     <T(ense),1>}

Chomsky (1995) argues that derivations using the same numeration constitute the reference set for a derivation; these derivations are candidates for comparison with respect to economy conditions, and only the 'cheapest' candidate, i.e. the one that violates the least economy conditions, is grammatical. With the arisal of local economy, the usefulness of numerations is less clear. See Lexical array.

Links

Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics

References

• Chomsky, N. 1995. The minimalist program, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts/London.