Merge, labeling and their interactions

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2017

Department/School

English Language and Literature

Publication Title

Labels and Roots

Abstract

This paper reviews and discusses a series of papers by Epstein, Kitahara and Seely, related to Chomsky’s (2013, 2014) ‘labeling by minimal search’ analysis. After providing a brief history of ‘labels,’ some empirically (and explanatorily) advantageous consequences of Chomsky’s labeling by minimal search analysis are revealed, including that (i) it explains ‘obligatory exit’ in A-movement without any reference to Merge-over-Move, lexical arrays and subarrays, nor in fact to the construct ‘phase’ (motivated in Chomsky 2000), at least suggesting the possibility of their eliminability, and (ii) it explains ‘obligatory halting’ in key instances of criterial freezing (without appeal to the analytical apparatus proposed in either Epstein 1992 or Rizzi 2014). These results are consistent with the twin (yet often implicit) goals of: (i) reducing Merge to its simplest and most unified form (with no labels nor label projection, as (to our knowledge) first proposed in Collins 2002, Seely 2006) while (ii) concomitantly maximizing Merge’s explanatory effects (postulating as few operations as possible beyond Merge). It is important to note that this research is entirely continuous with the 65 year old (scientific) enterprise of seeking to construct an explanatory theory of the format of descriptively adequate transformational and phrase structure rules (now unified under Merge) and to also explain the nature of the (apparent) constraints on transformational rule application, including when transformational application is obligatory (“obligatory exit”) and when it is prohibited (“freezing”), and why.

Comments

T. D. Seely is a faculty member in EMU's Department of English Language and Literature.

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