Merge: Binarity in (Multidominant) Syntax

by Barbara Citko, Martina Gracanin-Yuksek

Overview

An argument that Merge is binary but its binarity refers to syntactic positions rather than objects.

In this book, Barbara Citko and Martina Gračanin-Yüksek examine the constraints on Merge--the basic structure-building operation in minimalist syntax--from a multidominant perspective. They maintain that Merge is binary, but argue that the binarity of Merge refers to syntactic positions Merge relates: what has typically been formulated as a constraint that prevents Merge from combining more than two syntactic objects is a constraint on Merge's relating more than two syntactic positions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262361255
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	02/02/2021
Series:	Linguistic Inquiry Monographs , #83
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	190
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Barbara Citko is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington. She is the author of Phase Theory: An Introduction and Symmetry in Syntax: Merge, Move and Labels. Martina Gračanin-Yüksek is Professor in the Department of Foreign Language Education at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword vii

Acknowledgments ix

1 Introduction 1

2 Theoretical Background 13

2.1 Properties of the Computational System 13

2.2 Objects versus Positions 22

2.3 Conclusion 25

3 (Non)parallelism in Across-the-Board Extraction and Right Node Raising 27

3.1 Parallelism in Across-the-Board Movement 30

3.2 Absence of Parallelism in Right Node Raising 36

3.3 Widening the Perspective 42

3.4 Conclusion 49

4 The Binarity Constraint on Merge 51

4.1 Violations of the Binarity Constraint on Merge 51

4.2 Two Is Company, Three Is a Crowd: Right Node Raising versus Across-the-Board Movement 57

4.3 Subjects in Locative Inversion 64

4.4 Postverbal Subjects in Slavic 68

4.5 -Movement and the Binarity Constraint on Merge 73

4.6 Conclusion 76

5 Escaping the Binarity Constraint on Merge 77

5.1 Grammatical Across-the-Board Movement 80

5.2 Structurally Syncretic Positions 83

5.3 The Syncretism Effect 85

5.4 Successive-Cyclic Movement 94

Possible Alternatives 102

5.6 Structural Syncretism and Improper Movement 105

5.7 Conclusion 107

6 Consequences of Structural Syncretism 109

6.1 Embedding in Across-the-Board Configurations 109

6.2 The Vacuous Movement Hypothesis 118

6.3 Raising to Object 124

6.4 The Adverb Effect 126

6.5 Conclusion 136

7 Conclusion 137

Notes 141

References 159

Index 171

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This book takes head-on the job of providing the foundations for a syntax that allows phrases to occupy two syntactic positions simultaneously. These ‘multidominant’ phrase markers are the vanguard of modern syntax and this volume goes a long way toward showing why.”
—Kyle Johnson, Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
 
“An exemplary book of theoretical syntax, in which a simple idea, multidominance, sets off an impressive exploration into theory and data. Citko and Gračanin-Yuksek elegantly show that multidominant representations, far from being notational variants, reveal crucial properties of the core syntactic operation Merge that cannot be captured otherwise, deepening dramatically our understanding of empirical phenomena such as Right Node Raising and across-the-board extraction.”
—Caterina Donati, Professor of Linguistics, University of Paris