Abstract
It is pointed out that there are nontrivial problems attendant on the recovery of a phrase from within an already-built-up structure for the purpose of remerge, not the least of them being that it places too great a burden on the derivational memory. But these problems can be obviated if we can maintain the following: the Work Space in which a phrase is built up prior to being initially merged in a derivation does not “perish” with that operation but may be availed of for remerge. Now, we do not need Internal Merge. It is shown that, as a corollary, many current postulates such as PIC, the “escape hatch,” and partial spell-out of phases can be dropped from the theory. It is further shown that this way of executing remerge also gives us a more adequate account of pied-piping than any other existing proposal and that some current strictures of the theory such as the inadmissibility of moving intermediate projections naturally follow from it. So there are both theoretical and empirical reasons for adopting the proposed change.
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Notes
- 1.
See Koster (2007) for an awareness of the problems of Internal Merge. We examine these problems in Section “Recovering a Phrase for Remerge: The Problems of Internal Merge” (See also de Vries 2013: 146.)
- 2.
See Epstein et al. (2014) for important additional arguments for unifying External Merge and Internal Merge.
A clarification is possibly in order here. The movements that we plan to account for in our system are the “standard” A/A′ movements which are successive cyclic and long distance. (These are the movements that make use of the “edges” of phases in the system of Chomsky 2000.) But there are other types of phrasal movements that have been postulated in the literature, e.g., remnant movement, about which we have nothing to say. See fn. 16 for some remarks about these movements.
- 3.
We may assume that each such “derivational space” has its own Numeration or subarray.
- 4.
At a first glance, (4) may not look so very different from Internal Merge, especially if one were to argue that a “Work Space” is nothing more than the object created in it. But the difference of our system emerges very clearly when we consider a case like remerging an argument of an argument, in a configuration like (i) (where A is an argument of the main derivation and B is an argument of A):
The Internal Merge theory will do subextraction here; i.e., it will remerge a term of A to the root of the tree. But in our system, B will also be in a parallel Work Space, the same as A, and B will be directly merged from its Work Space to the main derivation. Importantly, this will be a root-to-root merge and not a term-to-root merge which is what Internal Merge is. (This is illustrated in Section “Pied-Piping”, in our account of pied-piping.)
- 5.
The idea is not without antecedents. In fact, Chomsky (2008: 145–146) briefly considers, and rejects, this idea, but the execution he had in mind was in terms of generating the same phrase afresh for every merge, and he rightly says that this involves too much computation.
The implementation of “multiple Merge” that comes closest to our proposal is the “Survive Minimalism” of Stroik (1999; 2009) and Putnam and Stroik (2010). In this system, a phrase is merged in its base position from a Work Bench. If the phrase has a feature which is unchecked in the base position, it “will return to (i.e., be copied in) the Work Bench for Remerge” (Stroik 2009: 44–45). It will now be remerged to every new head that extends the derivation, until this feature is checked. So in a sense, every remerge has external merge as its last step.
- 6.
For a contrary view, see Nunes and Uriagereka (2000).
- 7.
This last claim should not be too difficult to accept when we reflect that these complements can be quite complex, with arguments embedded in them, cf. He is proud of his daughter; He is a member of every club.
- 8.
Thus, we maintain a distinction between merge from the Numeration—ultimately from the Lexicon—and merge from a parallel Work Space. For a system that does not maintain this distinction, and which envisages a Numeration with “complex elements” (i.e., already-built-up phrases) in it, see Putnam and Stroik (2010); Stroik (2009: 44).
- 9.
All that we say here applies equally to the derivation of the phrases in the parallel Work Spaces. Thus, an argument of an argument will be built up externally and merged as a chunk into the “parent” argument; see fn. 4 and Section “Pied-Piping”.
- 10.
A possible query: A one-word argument or adjunct (e.g., “what” in “What did you see?”) would appear to have the option of being merged directly from the Numeration without going through a parallel Work Space. Is this possible? We would say not, for the following reasons: An argument, we said, is initially interpreted in the place where it is built up and then interpreted again for its relational meanings in the positions where it is merged. Therefore, an argument that comes directly from the Numeration will not be fully interpreted. Also, this argument will not be able to move, given our account of remerge.
- 11.
There is actually also a fourth case, namely the merge of two LIs, which is how every derivation must start with. The Chomskyan solution is similar to that of case (iii): Either LI can be the label, and the “wrong” choice will be filtered out at the C-I interface. Note that this fourth case too presents no problem for our system, because one of the LIs must be an argument. Therefore, it must be merged from a parallel Work Space and will be inert in the matter of projection.
- 12.
The idea is repeated further down on the same page: “Suppose a derivation has reached state Σ = {α, β, δ i … δ n }. The application of an operation that forms K [where K = {γ, {α, β}}, γ the label—KAJ] … converts Σ to Σ′ = {K, δ i … δ n }, including K but not α, β.”
- 13.
(9b) and (9c) would be considered instances of heavy pied-piping. We comment on how we can deal with the differing acceptability judgments about heavy pied-piping later in this section.
- 14.
We comment on the “free movement” idea of Chomsky (2013) later.
- 15.
VP can be displaced by other types of operations than pied-piping, see fn. 16; but TP-movement (stranding C) is not possible at all.
- 16.
Let us glance at this juncture at some other types of movements that need to be distinguished from pied-piping. N-to-D movement or V-to-T movement—head movement, more generally—obviously does not fall within the purview of pied-piping. It is easy to differentiate this type of movement—which has its own very distinct properties: It is morphologically motivated, strictly local, and can induce “roll-up”—from phrasal movement of the type that we are concerned with (Jayaseelan 2010b).
We said (fn. 15) that VP can be displaced by other types of movements than pied-piping. We can think of at least two such movements. One is remnant VP-movement (Kayne 1998). This controversial type of movement has been sought to be explained as a “repair strategy” (Müller 2000), or as a movement necessitated by the need to bring together the verb and its inflexion (Jayaseelan 2010a). It is strictly local. A second type of movement is VP-fronting or more generally predicate fronting:
-
(i)
Kiss her, I didn’t.
-
(ii)
Innocent, he is not.
A fronted VP/predicate needs—at least in English—a linguistic antecedent (Phillips 2003); it is in this respect like VP-deletion. It is interesting that both remnant VP-movement and VP-fronting are operations that remove a constituent from the “bottom of the tree.” And they certainly do not move a constituent from Spec-to-Spec. It should be obvious that these movements have nothing to do with the types of movements that Chomskyan checking theory and EPP try to account for, and which we usually have in mind when we speak of Internal Merge.
-
(i)
- 17.
It can be easily shown that in these latter languages, TP pied-piping is completely impossible. Cf. the following Malayalam data, showing the completely normal (and standard) CP pied-piping and an attempted TP pied-piping:
Extraction of a wh-phrase from an embedded clause (by Spec-to-Spec movement) is not possible in Malayalam; this fact may appear to support Heck’s constraint. But then, why can’t the derivation be saved by TP pied-piping to the cleft focus?
- 18.
There is more to be said about heavy pied-piping in the Germanic languages. First of all, the judgments are gradient; even within English, there are speakers who find examples of heavy pied-piping completely acceptable—e.g., (famously) Ross (1967). Also (as is well-known), heavy pied-piping is better in matrix questions than in embedded questions, and in non-restrictive relative clauses than in restrictive relative clauses, which suggests that there are factors like sentence stress at play here. Again, there are many rather complicated differences within the Germanic family, between English, Dutch, and German (see de Vries 2005). All this suggests that the constraints on heavy pied-piping—whatever they are—should not be part of the “core” account of pied-piping. In our system, there is no special rule of pied-piping. Pied-piping is simply an instance of the completely normal operation of remerge of phrases from parallel Work Spaces.
- 19.
- 20.
Note that this would be a “third factor” explanation (in the sense of Chomsky 2005) of the opacity of adjuncts, unlike the bounding node idea.
- 21.
A traditional claim in the literature on parasitic gaps is that a parasitic gap cannot be inside an extraction island properly contained in an adjunct (or subject)—this was the main supporting evidence for an operator movement account of this phenomenon (Chomsky 1986). Cf.
-
(i)
* Which booki did you like t i [after meeting the man who wrote t i ]?
But the following sentence is equally bad although there is no extraction island inside the adjunct:
-
(ii)
* Which book i did you like t i [ after your wife said that she liked t i ]?
A number of unclear factors seem to impinge on the acceptability of parasitic gaps. It is perhaps correct to say that a parasitic gap is “perfect” only when the adjunct that contains it is nonfinite and has a PRO-subject, or at least if the subject of the adjunct is the same as the subject of the main clause; cf.:
-
(iii)
-
a.
Which books i do you read t i before buying t i ?
-
b.
Which booksi do you read t i , before you buy t i ?
-
c.
* Which books i do you read t i , before your students buy t i ?
Consider the following example from Chomsky and Lasnik (1993) (cited by Nunes 2004: 115)
-
a.
-
(iv)
* The book was filed without my reading first.
Chomsky and Lasnik cite this sentence as evidence that a trace of A-movement cannot license a parasitic gap, but this cannot be the right explanation, cf. (v) which has an operator trace to license the parasitic gap:
-
(v)
* Which book did you file without my reading first?
Nunes’s explanation (ibid.) of (iv) is that the book in the subject position of the main clause and its copy in the object position of reading cannot form a chain “because of the intervention of my.” This explanation might be on the right track, for it seems to me that the gradient judgments about parasitic gaps are due to factors of interpretation and not of phrasal movement per se.
-
(i)
- 22.
See also Epstein et al. (2014) for a discussion of this new conception of remerge, which the authors call “simplest Merge.”
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Jayaseelan, K.A. (2017). Parallel Work Spaces in Syntax and the Inexistence of Internal Merge. In: Sengupta, G., Sircar, S., Raman, M., Balusu, R. (eds) Perspectives on the Architecture and Acquisition of Syntax. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4295-9_5
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