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In this paper we study the non-determinism between the inference rules of the lazy narrowing calculus lnc (Middeldorp et al., 1996, Theoret. Comput. Sci., 167, 95-130). We show that all non-determinism can be removed without losing the important completeness property by restricting the underlying term rewriting systems to left-linear confluent constructor systems and interpreting equality as strict equality. For the subclass of orthogonal constructor systems the resulting narrowing calculus is shown to have the nice property that solutions computed by different derivations starting from the same goal are incomparable. † A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the

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Narrowing is an important method for solving unification problems in equational theories that are presented by confluent term rewriting systems. Because narrowing is a rather complicated operation, several authors studied calculi in which narrowing is replaced by more simple inference rules. This paper is concerned with one such calculus. Contrary to what has been stated in the literature, we show that the calculus lacks strong completeness, so selection functions to cut down the search space are not applicable. \u prove completeness of the calculus and we establish an interesting connection between its strong completeness and the completeness of basic narrowing. We also address the eager variable elimination problem. It is known that many redundant derivations can be avoided if the variable elimination rule, one of the inference rules of our calculus, is given precedence over the other inference rules. We prove the completeness of a restricted variant of eager variable elimination in the case of orthogonal term rewriting systems.