A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics
n. (also global constraint, global rule) In a derivational theory of grammar, a constraint that links two non-successive levels of representation.
Absent from the Standard Theory of TG, derivational constraints were introduced by Lakoff (1970); while Lakoff’s original formulation of them did not survive, certain aspects of them were reconstructed within the Revised Extended Standard Theory in the form of traces. Traces, which continue to be important in the GB framework, effectively permit a syntactic representation to ‘remember’ what has happened at earlier stages of a derivation, and hence derivational constraints are in some sense a part of GB.
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