Una panorámica sobre la restricción conservadora de la estructura

Abstract

The development of Generative Grammar has been basically aimed to unite its descriptive and explicative necessities. This is the main motivation underlying the modifications of its different versions. This paper focuses on one of the constraints that has helped most to achieve this task, namely Emonds’ (1970, 1976) Structure-Preserving Constraint (SPC). It must be said, however, that this constraint was rather limited in its original formulation because of some inconsistencies and of its restricted nature (it was only referred to the transformational component). This article outlines the aforementioned inconsistencies and explains how they have been overcome and how the SPC has been extended to other components and levels making it a profitable constraint for the theory of grammar.