Late Merge as Lowering Movement in Minimalist Grammars

摘要

Minimalist grammars can be specified in terms of their derivation tree languages and a mapping from derivations to derived trees, each of which is definable in monadic second-order logic (MSO). It has been shown that the linguistically motivated operation Late Merge can push either component past the threshold of MSO-definability. However, Late Merge as used in the syntactic literature can be elegantly recast in terms of Lowering movement within the framework of Movement-generalized Minimalist grammars. As the latter are MSO-definable, the linguistically relevant fragment of Late Merge is too.