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.
@Misc{Graf14LACLtalk,
author = {Graf, Thomas},
title = {{L}ate {M}erge as Lowering Movement in {M}inimalist Grammars},
year = {2014},
note = {Slides of a talk given at {LACL} 2014, June 18--20,
{IRIT}, Toulouse, France}
}