Some Consequences of MERGE and Determinacy
Nobu Goto, Toru Ishii
February 2020
 

Chomsky (2019a, b, c) and Chomsky, Gallego, and Ott (2019) propose that MERGE operates on a workspace, claiming that the set of elements accessible to MERGE be reduced to a minimum under Resource Restriction (RR) that forces MERGE to apply in a determinate fashion (see, in particular, Chomsky 2019a for determinacy as one of the principles that any operation for language ought to meet). Specifically, Chomsky (2019b, c) claims that RR includes both minimal search and the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC) and Chomsky, Gallego, and Ott (2019) suggest that the principle of Determinacy applies at the output of MERGE. This paper indicates potential conceptual flaws in Chomsky (2019a, b, c) and Chomsky, Gallego, and Ott (2019), and proposes that RR only include the PIC and the principle of Determinacy apply at the input of MERGE, thereby overcoming the flaws. The proposed theory is also empirically superior in that it provides a unified, principled account of various movement restrictions on different languages, which have been explained by different constraints or principles: the subject condition, verb particle constructions, the specificity effects, no vacuous topicalization, the non-existence of complementizer-less subject relatives, the that-trace effects, the freezing effects with topics, further raising, Merge-over-Move, island violation repairs by ellipsis and pronouns, no superfluous steps in a derivation, and the anti-locality effects.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/004108
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Unpublished manuscript, Toyo University and Meiji University
keywords: (capital) merge, workspace, determinacy, the subject condition, the specificity effect, the that-trace effects, no vacuous topicalization, non-existence of complementizer-less subject relatives, freezing effects with topics, merge-over-move, further raising, island violation repairs, no superfluous steps in a derivation, syntax
previous versions: v3 [September 2019]
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