In 'Constituents, arrays, and trees: two (more) models of grammatical description', recently published in Folia Linguistica, Diego argues that while early Generative Grammar was founded on the concept of Immediate Constituents, around the mid-80's the foundations of the field shifted in ways that took it away from Immediate Constituents and closer to the mathematical concept of an array, while the continued use of the same terminology and symbols has obscured the shift and got us talking at cross purposes.

In 'Raising to object: a graph-theoretic analysis', recently published in Evolutionary Linguistic Theory, Diego Krivochen introduces a set of tools for syntactic analysis based on graph theory. Whereas Minimalist syntax builds structure via the operation Merge(X, Y) = {X, Y} (take the two syntactic objects X and Y and combine them into an unordered set), Diego proposes to replace this with an operation Merge(X, Y) = e<X, Y>, where e is an edge (specifically a 'directed edge', a line with a direction) joining nodes X and Y. All technical concepts are explained, and the value of the theory is shown via a case study on the syntactic behaviour of English accusativus cum infinitivo or Raising-to-Object constructions, such as 'Mike expected Greg to take out the trash'.

Congratulations, Diego!