Merge (linguistics)
This recursive property of Merge has been claimed to be a fundamental characteristic that distinguishes language from other cognitive faculties.
Merge is assumed to have certain formal properties constraining syntactic structure, and is implemented with specific mechanisms.
In terms of a merge-base theory of language acquisition, complements and specifiers are simply notations for first-merge (read as "complement-of" [head-complement]), and later second-merge (read as "specifier-of" [specifier-head]), with merge always forming to a head.
In its original formulation by Chomsky in 1995 Merge was defined as inherently asymmetric; in Moro 2000 it was first proposed that Merge can generate symmetrical structures provided that they are rescued by movement and asymmetry is restored [2] For example, an {N, N}-compound of 'boat-house' would allow the ambiguous readings of either 'a kind of house' and/or 'a kind of boat'.
It is only with second-merge that order is derived out of a set {a {a, b}} which yields the recursive properties of syntax.
It is this property of recursion that allows for projection and labeling of a phrase to take place;[2] in this case, that the Noun 'boat' is the head of the compound, and 'house' acting as a kind of specifier/modifier.
Internal-merge (second-merge) establishes more formal aspects related to edge-properties of scope and discourse-related material pegged to CP.
[3] As a consequence, at the "external/first-merge-only" stage, young children would show an inability to interpret readings from a given ordered pair, since they would only have access to the mental parsing of a non-recursive set.
[4] In addition to word-order violations, other more ubiquitous results of a first-merge stage would show that children's initial utterances lack the recursive properties of inflectional morphology, yielding a strict Non-inflectional stage-1, consistent with an incremental Structure building model of child language.
[5] Merge takes two objects α and β and combines them, creating a binary structure.
In some variants of the Minimalist Program Merge is triggered by feature checking, e.g. the verb eat selects the noun cheesecake because the verb has an uninterpretable N-feature [uN] ("u" stands for "uninterpretable"), which must be checked (or deleted) due to full interpretation.
Schematically it can be illustrated as: There are three different accounts of how strong features force movement:[7][8] 1.
Phonetic Form (PF) crash theory (Chomsky 1993) is conceptually motivated.
The argument goes as follows: under the assumption that Logical Form (LF) is invariant, it must be the case that any parametric differences between languages reduce to morphological properties that are reflected at PF (Chomsky 1993:192).
Logical Form (LF) crash theory (Chomsky 1994) is empirically motivated by VP ellipsis.
Immediate elimination theory ((Chomsky 1995)) Initially, the cooperation of Last Resort (LR) and the Uniformity Condition (UC) were the indicators of the structures provided by Bare Phrase which contain labels and are constructed by move, as well the impact of the Structure Preservation Hypothesis.
In this tree, the verb "read" is the head selecting the DP "the book", which makes the constituent a VP.
[13] BPS is a representation of the structure of phrases in which syntactic units are not explicitly assigned to categories.
[19] Collins proposed that economy features, such as Minimality, govern derivations and lead to simpler representations.
In more recent work by John Lowe and John Lundstrand, published in 2020, minimal phrase structure is formulated as an extension to bare phrase structure and X-bar theory.
Lowe and Lundstrand argue that any successful phrase structure theory, should include the following seven features:[16] Although Bare Phrase Structure includes many of these features, it does not include all of them, therefore other theories have attempted to incorporate all of these features in order to present a successful phrase structure theory.
[20] As it is commonly understood, standard Merge adopts three key assumptions about the nature of syntactic structure and the faculty of language: While these three assumptions are taken for granted for the most part by those working within the broad scope of the Minimalist Program, other theories of syntax reject one or more of them.
In these theories, operations over attribute-value matrices (feature structures) are used to account for many of the same facts.
X-bar theory is a template that claims that all lexical items project three levels of structure: X, X', and XP.
However, the two theories differ in the claims they make about the nature of the Specifier-Head-Complement (S-H-C) structure.
