Intermediate Constituents

The prevailing view in minimalist syntactic theory is that syntactic representations are generated step-by-step over the course of a derivation. Furthermore, there has been a widespread adoption of several principles barring syntactic operations from changing their inputs in any way. This dissertation is focused on one of those principles---that is, the Extension Condition. Informally, the Extension Condition says that structure-building operations must apply to and extend uncontained syntactic objects (i.e. the roots of syntactic trees). I argue that every derivational theory of syntax that always obeys the Extension Condition has a strongly equivalent declarative (also known as representational) alternative.