Abstract Minimalist grammars can be specified in terms of their derivation tree languages and a mapping from derivations to derived trees, each of which is definable in monadic second-order logic (MSO). It has been shown that the linguistically motivated operation Late Merge can push either component past the threshold of MSO-definability. However, Late Merge as used in the syntactic literature can be elegantly recast in terms of Lowering movement within the framework of Movement-generalized Minimalist grammars. As the latter are MSO-definable, the linguistically relevant fragment of Late Merge is too.
@InProceedings{Graf14LACL,
author = {Graf, Thomas},
title = {Late Merge as Lowering Movement in {M}inimalist Grammars},
year = {2014},
booktitle = {{LACL} 2014},
pages = {107--121},
editor = {Asher, Nicholas and Soloviev, Sergei},
volume = {8535},
series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
address = {Heidelberg},
publisher = {Springer},
doi = {10.1007/978-3-662-43742-1_9},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43742-1_9}
}