Wholesale Late Merger: Beyond the A/A[over-bar] Distinction

In this article, we develop a substantially expanded theory of late merger. Adopting related insights by Fox (2002), we argue that late merger is permitted whenever an output representation can be interpreted in the semantic component. A consequence of our approach is that late merger is available n...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Takahashi, Shoichi, Hulsey, Sarah
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: MIT Press 2011
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/65947
Description
Summary:In this article, we develop a substantially expanded theory of late merger. Adopting related insights by Fox (2002), we argue that late merger is permitted whenever an output representation can be interpreted in the semantic component. A consequence of our approach is that late merger is available not only for the well-known case of adjuncts, but also for restrictors of determiners (wholesale late merger). We demonstrate that this theory can explain the different reconstruction possibilities of A-movement and A-movement, as well as various otherwise puzzling facts about movement and ellipsis, while still maintaining the copy theory of movement.