Merge (linguistics) - Three Controversial Aspects of Merge

Three Controversial Aspects of Merge

Standard Merge (i.e. as it is commonly understood) encourages one to adopt three key assumptions about the nature of syntactic structure and the faculty of language: 1) sentence structure is generated bottom up in the mind of speakers (as opposed to top down or left to right), 2) all syntactic structure is binary branching (as opposed to n-ary branching) and 3) syntactic structure is constituency-based (as opposed to dependency-based). While these three assumptions are taken for granted for the most part by those working within the broad scope of the Minimalist Program, other theories of syntax reject one or more of them.

Merge is commonly seen as merging smaller constituents to greater constituents until the greatest constituent, the sentence, is reached. This bottom-up view of structure generation is rejected by representational (=non-derivational) theories (e.g. Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Lexical Functional Grammar, most dependency grammars, etc.), and it is contrary to early work in Transformational Grammar. The phrase structure rules of context free grammar, for instance, were generating sentence structure top down.

Merge is usually assumed to merge just two constituents at a time, a limitation that results in tree structures in which all branching is binary. While the strictly binary branching structures have been argued for in detail, one can also point to a number of empirical considerations that cast doubt on these strictly binary branching structures, e.g. the results of standard constituency tests. For this reason, most grammar theories outside of Government and Binding Theory and the Minimalist Program allow for n-ary branching.

Merge merges two constituents in such a manner that these constituents become sister constituents and are daughters of the newly created mother constituent. This understanding of how structure is generated is constituency-based (as opposed to dependency-based). Dependency grammars (e.g. Meaning-Text Theory, Functional Generative Description, Word grammar) disagree with this aspect of Merge, since they take syntactic structure to be dependency-based.