Constraining Free Merge

Constraining Free Merge

Blog Article

Some recent influential work in the Minimalist Feeders Program takes the position that Merge, the core language ability to recursively combine two elements together, is free.However, if Merge were completely free, there would be an infinite number of possible derivations for every utterance.Thus, Merge must be constrained in some way.

In this paper, I LAUNDRY BASKET describe a computer model of language that implements a limited form of Merge that is free.I attempt to demonstrate that, within the confines of the language module, Labeling is generally sufficient to constrain Free Merge, and I discuss issues that arise regarding overgeneration of syntactic structures given Free Merge.