Hisatsugu Kitahara

Labeling by minimal search: Implications for successive-cyclic A-movement and the conception of the postulate “phase”

We argue that Chomsky’s (2013) ‘‘label identification by minimal search’’ explains ‘‘obligatory exit’’ from intermediate positions, not only in the successive-cyclic Ā-movement phenomena that Chomsky analyzes, but also in (phase-internal) successive-cyclic A-movement. Moreover, it does so by employing simplest Merge and third-factor minimal search for label identification. Our extension of Chomsky’s analysis to A-movement operates without any appeal to Merge-over- Move or to lexical arrays or subarrays. This in turn renders the concept ‘‘phase’’ itself no longer necessary in analyzing the core cases of illicit A-movement, shown to reduce to labeling failure. Implications of this result and the nature of the long-standing evidence for strict cyclicity are discussed.

TWO (OR MORE) SYNTACTIC CATEGORIES VS. MULTIPLE OCCURRENCES OF ONE

. This paper advances Epstein et al.s (1998) derivational approach with a new proposal that an NP gets interpreted upon the checking of its Case feature in the course of a derivation. As a consequence of this proposal, an inclusiveness-violating aspect of Chomskys (1995) system is shown to be eliminable.

Phase cancellation by external pair-merge of heads

Abstract As Chomsky (2004, 2005) notes, a theory with set-Merge allows this operation to apply in two different ways, externally (to two separate objects) and internally (one object contained within the other). Here we extend Chomsky’s form of argument to pair-Merge; i.e. in the absence of some stipulation preventing it, it too can apply in two ways: internally and externally. We will argue that external pair-Merge of heads overcomes a paradox concerning bridge verb constructions. In the final section we note that external pair-Merge of heads is, in effect, a “presyntactic” morphological (“word formation”) rule entailed by current syntactic theory. The extent to which the standard theory of morphological operations can be subsumed by external pair-Merge of heads, further unifying syntax and (aspects of) morphology is left for further research.