Merge: Binarity in (Multidominant) Syntax

Merge

Linguistic Inquiry Monographs

Samuel Jay Keyser, general editor

A complete list of books published in the Linguistic Inquiry Monographs series appears at the back of this book.

Merge

Binarity in (Multidominant) Syntax

Barbara Citko and Martina Gračanin-Yuksek

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Times New Roman by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Citko, Barbara, 1970– author. | Gračanin-Yuksek, Martina, author.

Title: Merge : binarity in (multidominant) syntax / Barbara Citko, Martina Gračanin-Yuksek.

Description: Cambridge : The MIT Press, 2020. | Series: Linguistic inquiry monographs ; 83 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020004636 | ISBN 9780262044790 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780262539869 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Grammar, Comparative and general—Syntax. | Parallelism (Linguistics)

Classification: LCC P291 .C563 2020 | DDC 415—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004636

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents

Series Foreword

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

2 Theoretical Background

2.1 Properties of the Computational System

2.2 Objects versus Positions

2.3 Conclusion

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

3.1 Parallelism in Across-the-Board Movement

3.2 Absence of Parallelism in Right Node Raising

3.3 Widening the Perspective

3.4 Conclusion

4 The Binarity Constraint on Merge

4.1 Violations of the Binarity Constraint on Merge

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

4.3 Subjects in Locative Inversion

4.4 Postverbal Subjects in Slavic

4.5 A-Movement and the Binarity Constraint on Merge

4.6 Conclusion

5 Escaping the Binarity Constraint on Merge

5.1 Grammatical Across-the-Board Movement

5.2 Structurally Syncretic Positions

5.3 The Syncretism Effect

5.4 Successive-Cyclic Movement

5.5 Possible Alternatives

5.6 Structural Syncretism and Improper Movement

5.7 Conclusion

6 Consequences of Structural Syncretism

6.1 Embedding in Across-the-Board Configurations

6.2 The Vacuous Movement Hypothesis

6.3 Raising to Object

6.4 The Adverb Effect

6.5 Conclusion

7 Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

Series Foreword

We are pleased to present the eighty-third volume in the series Linguistic Inquiry Monographs. These monographs present new and original research beyond the scope of the article. We hope they will benefit our field by bringing to it perspectives that will stimulate further research and insight.

Originally published in limited edition, the Linguistic Inquiry Monographs are now more widely available. This change is due to the great interest engendered by the series and by the needs of a growing readership. The editors thank the readers for their support and welcome suggestions about future directions for the series.

Samuel Jay Keyser

for the Editorial Board

Acknowledgments

It was in May 2016 that the two of us sat together in Ithaca, New York, and decided to extend the scope of our work and write a monograph. Since then, the research presented in the book has evolved enormously. In the process, versions of it have been presented in several venues and have profited from comments made by many people that we would like to thank for their support. We would like to start with our editor Marc Lowenthal. Marc was encouraging from the very start of our project and has been an invaluable guide through the entire process. We are also greatly indebted to the three MIT Press reviewers for their very thoughtful and detailed comments and suggestions, as well as for constructive criticisms that led to substantial improvements in the final version. Our special thanks go to the reviewer who we know as Reviewer 3 for a meticulous evaluation of our work and for all the ideas included in the review, many of which are now part of the book. Finally, we would like to thank Anne Mark for being not only fantastically quick and thorough in her copyediting, but also extremely approachable and friendly during the whole process.

Between the inception of the monograph and its publication, we presented its content (or parts of it) to various audiences. We would like to acknowledge them here: the audience at NELS (North East Linguistic Society) 48, held at the University of Iceland (October 2017), where we first presented our Binarity Constraint on Merge; the audiences at colloquia at New York University (May 2017) and the University of Leipzig (January 2018); the audience who came to see our poster at the Crete Summer School in Linguistics (July 2018); the audience at the Morphology and Syntax Workshop at the University of Chicago (December 2018), where Barbara presented the core research ideas in this monograph; and finally, the audience at the colloquium series of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Lomonosov Moscow State University (September 2019), where Martina presented a postreview version of the monograph. We would like to particularly acknowledge the comments and questions of the following members of these audiences: Karlos Arregi, Benjamin Bruening, Ksenia Ershova, Stefan Keine, Julie Anne Legate, Jason Merchant, Gereon Müller, Andy Murphy, Eszter Ronai, Philippe Schlenker, Laura Stigliano, Sandhya Sundaresan, Anna Szabolcsi, Michelle Yuan, and Erik Zyman.

Besides these formal occasions on which we had an opportunity to present our work, we discussed it with a number of people in more informal settings; we would like to thank Kyle Johnson, Roni Katzir, and Umut Özge for discussion of various aspects of our proposal. We would like to thank David Pesetsky for his comments on the book prospectus, and Kyle Johnson for teaching a very inspiring course on movement and multidominance at the Crete Summer School, which Barbara attended. Special thanks go to colleagues who helped us with grammaticality judgments in Croatian, English, and Polish. We apologize to anyone we omitted, and we alone are responsible for any omissions, misrepresentations, or remaining mistakes.

Finally, we would each like to thank our families and home institutions for their support throughout this process. Barbara would like to thank her husband Randy for his unwavering support, her colleagues and students at the University of Washington for creating a collegial work atmosphere, the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center on San Juan Island (where portions of the monograph were written) for providing occasional necessary respite from everyday life, and the University of Washington for granting her a sabbatical leave in 2018–2019.

Martina is grateful to her husband Eray, her son Jan, her mum Grozdana, and her dad Emil (who, unfortunately, is no longer here to witness the final product, but whose memory this book honors), for graciously accepting the long hours of Skyping with Barbara, endless writing, rewriting, editing, and more, and for cheering her on throughout this journey. Heartfelt thanks go to the people in the Department of English Language Teaching at Middle East Technical University for their friendship and support.

1 Introduction

Our main goal in this monograph is to explore properties of Merge against the backdrop of multidominant syntax. While research on multidominance to date has led to a number of important theoretical and empirical insights regarding the properties, linearization, and interpretation of multidominant structures (Moltmann 1992; Wilder 1999, 2008; Citko 2000, 2005, 2011a, b; Gračanin-Yuksek 2007, 2013; Bachrach and Katzir 2009, 2017; De Vries 2009, 2013b; Johnson 2012, 2018, among many others), there have been fewer attempts to capitalize on the specific properties of multidominant derivations and representations in order to advance the understanding of Merge itself. In this monograph, we aim to remedy this gap.

We assume the syntactic architecture whereby Merge, the basic structure-building operation in Minimalist syntax, has the ability to create multidominant structures. We also assume that the two types of Merge responsible for creating multidominant structures are Internal Merge and Parallel Merge. Following Chomsky (2004), we take Internal Merge to be a way to capture syntactic displacement/movement. However, we take the term Internal Merge quite literally and assume that the moving element (such as B in (1a–b)), instead of being copied and pasted into its new position, as shown in (1a), is simply remerged in a new position, as shown in (1b) (Engdahl 1980; Starke 2001; Gärtner 2002; Zhang 2004; Johnson 2012, 2018, among others).

(1) a.

b.

A concrete example is given in (2a–b).¹

(2) a. Whati did Pat read ti?

b.

However, there also exists another type of multidominance, created by Parallel Merge (in Citko’s [2000, 2005] terminology), illustrated in (3a–b). First, A (externally) merges with B; next, B parallel-merges with C. The result is a multidominant/multirooted structure in which neither mother of B dominates its other mother (McCawley 1982; Blevins 1990; Wilder 1999, 2008; Citko 2000, 2003, 2005, 2011a, b; Van Riemsdijk 2000, 2006b; Gärtner 2002; Gračanin-Yuksek 2007, 2013; Bachrach and Katzir 2009, 2017; Johnson 2012, 2018; Citko and Gračanin-Yuksek 2013, 2016; De Vries 2013a, b, among many others).²

(3) a.

b.

We take Right Node Raising (RNR) to be a representative example of Parallel Merge (McCawley 1982; Goodall 1987; Wilder 1999; Fox and Pesetsky 2007; Johnson 2007; Bachrach and Katzir 2009; Citko 2011b; De Vries 2013a, b, among others, and contra Postal 1998; Sabbagh 2007, among others).³ For instance, in (4) the DP a paper by a famous linguist is merged with the verb reviewed in the first conjunct and the verb edited in the second conjunct.

(4) a. Pat reviewed __ and Chris edited __, a paper by a famous linguist.⁴

b.

Furthermore, we assume that the same object may undergo both Parallel Merge and Internal Merge, as shown in (5), where B is fırst parallel-merged with A and C, and then internally merged with F.

(5)

This is what we take to be the case in across-the-board (ATB) wh-questions, as shown in (6) (see Williams 1978; Goodall 1987; Muadz 1991; Moltmann 1992; Citko 2000, 2005, 2011b; Gračanin-Yuksek 2013; De Vries 2013b, 2017, among others, for various variants of multidominance approaches to ATB questions).⁵

(6) a. What paperi did Pat review ti and Chris edit ti?

b.

The fundamental question that we focus on throughout this monograph is what constraints emerge when Parallel Merge and Internal Merge apply to the same object, and what these constraints say about Merge itself. We show that the interaction between Parallel Merge and Internal Merge reveals constraints on Merge that are not detectable in configurations that do not involve multidominance.

We proceed as follows. In chapter 2, we spell out our assumptions about the computational system within which Merge operates. We outline the concepts that will be relevant for the analysis that we develop in subsequent chapters, the crucial ones being the concepts of a workspace, a derivation, and a syntactic position. While these concepts are intuitively well-understood, we provide formal definitions, following in some (but not all) respects the formal definitions given in Collins and Stabler 2016. What will be important to our proposal is that a workspace can contain more than a single derivation, which will allow us to relativize constraints to derivations in a system with multidominant structures.

In chapter 3, we lay out the empirical domain of our investigation. Since our focus is on the interaction between Parallel Merge and Internal Merge, we contrast ATB movement (where both Internal Merge and Parallel Merge apply to a single object) and RNR (where only Parallel Merge applies). The empirical insight that we explore is that certain violations of parallelism that are disallowed in ATB extraction are allowed in RNR. We start with Williams’s (1978) observation that ATB extraction is ungrammatical if the fronted wh-phrase is extracted from nonparallel positions, as in (7a), which contrasts with the grammatical (7b), where the wh-phrase is extracted from parallel positions.⁶

(7) a. *I know a man whoi Bill saw ti and ti likes Mary.

b. I know a man whoi Bill saw ti and Mary liked ti.

(Williams 1978: 34)

Interestingly, analogous lack of parallelism in RNR does not result in ungrammaticality once we control for independent constraints on RNR, as shown by the grammatical status of (8a–b).

(8) a. Everyone expected __, and into the room walked __, a guy in a blue suit.

b. Into the room walked __, and everyone’s eyes turned to __, the defendant’s former wife.

In this chapter, we also include data from Croatian and Polish, two Slavic languages that exhibit more word order flexibility than English, which enables us to test the differences between ATB extraction and RNR in a wider range of environments. Crucially though, these languages pattern with English in disallowing ATB extraction from nonparallel positions, but allowing analogous RNR constructions.⁷

In chapter 4, we derive the contrast between ATB extraction and RNR from an independent constraint on Merge, which we dub the Binarity Constraint on Merge (BiCoM) and give in (9).

(9) Binarity Constraint on Merge (first version, to be modified)

Merge cannot relate more than two positions at a time within a single derivation.

We argue that in ungrammatical examples of ATB extraction, illustrated by (7a) and (10a), Merge relates more than two positions in a derivation, as shown in (10b–c): the positions that the extracted wh-phrase (the circled who) occupies in the two conjuncts (Spec,vP in the first conjunct and Spec,TP in the second conjunct) and the position of the root with which it is merged (the circled CP in (10b), which becomes C' in (10c)).⁸ Since this violates BiCoM, the outcome is ungrammatical. Our analysis thus derives the ungrammaticality of ATB extraction from nonparallel positions from a general constraint on Merge, rather than from the specifics of the construction in which it arises.

(10) a. *Tell me whoi everyone expected ti and ti walked into the room.

b. *Tell me

c. *Tell me

This proposal receives support from the fact that analogous examples of RNR, such as the one in (11a), are grammatical and therefore BiCoM-compliant. We argue that RNR does not violate BiCoM because the element that is shared between the conjuncts in RNR examples (the DP a guy in a blue suit) does not undergo further Merge operations after the two conjuncts have been united into a single derivation.

(11) a. Everyone expected __, and into the room walked __, a guy in a blue suit.

b.

The proposal that Merge is subject to some kind of binarity constraint is by no means new (see, for example, Kayne’s [1981, 1984] argument that syntactic representations are limited to binary branching—that is, Merge can only combine two objects at a time). However, since our discussion of Merge is couched in a multidominant system, it is possible for Merge to target two objects at a time but nevertheless violate BiCoM.

In chapter 5, we discuss two principled exceptions to BiCoM. The first involves grammatical cases of ATB extraction, such as the one in (12a). As shown in (12b), Internal Merge in this case violates BiCoM because who ends up occupying three positions: the complement of the verb saw, the complement of the verb liked, and the specifier of CP, and these three positions are related to the position of C′. Thus, Merge relates four positions in a single derivation.⁹

(12) a. I know a man whoi Bill saw ti and Mary liked ti.

b. I know a

The second case where we would expect to find BiCoM violations, but we don’t, involves successive-cyclic movement. In the run-of-the-mill long-distance wh-question in (13a), whose structure is given in (13b), all instances of Internal Merge except the first relate multiple positions in a single derivation. For example, when the wh-phrase who is merged in the specifier of the matrix vP, Merge relates five positions: all the positions of who (the complement of the verb liked, the specifier of the embedded vP, the specifier of the embedded CP, the specifier of the matrix vP) and the position of the matrix v′, with which who merges.

(13) a. [CPWhoi did Bill [vPti say [CPti